The main goals of this event are:
- To share recent advances in research.
- To plan and promote public-private-partnership actions.
Enterprises in the retailing, logistics and transportation sectors have to face several difficult challenges related to the complexity of logistics and distribution strategies. Among others, they have to design business and distribution strategies as well as policies which combine competitiveness, and economic efficiency with sustainability criteria. These issues are critical, especially for small and medium enterprises (SME), since they hardly have the economic and human resources necessary to implement and manage the complex mathematical methods associated with logistics optimization. One strategy that SMEs can follow to become more competitive is to collaborate with other companies (Horizontal Cooperation), allowing the use of economies of scale. Fortunately, new quantitative methods can be developed now thanks to theoretical advances as well as to the increase in computer power. This is the case of hybrid methods combining metaheuristics, simulation, exact methods, parallel and distributed computing, multi-agent approaches, etc. In particular, as a new research field, 'simheuristics' evolves from the simulation-optimization knowledge field and goes one step further by proposing the integration of simulation techniques, metaheuristics, and Internet computing as the most efficient way to deal with the uncertainty and complexity levels which characterize most real-life problems in logistics and transportation.
According to the previous ideas, we have settled the following global objectives for our project:
1. Diagnosis and statement of the main concerns, economic models, and future challenges of horizontal cooperation and green logistics and road transportation.
2. Development of theoretical models that represent adequately the real logistics and transportation problems faced by the SMEs in Spain and Europe.
3. Development of new simheuristics and metaheuristics which benefit from parallel/distributed computing techniques to efficiently solve transportation and logistics problems considering horizontal cooperation and environmental issues.
