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Industry news and insights into efficient logistics solutions: Learn more about optimized tour planning for logistics experts and field services!

News about logistic tour optimization | Greenplan

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Greenplan CEO Dr. Clemens Beckmann stresses the importance of smart tour planning solutions for more efficient deliveries

The September issue of Parcel and Postal Technology International magazine features leading industry frontrunners on the power of tour optimization. A brand new Sustainability Special Report explains how smart algorithms support dispatchers in their daily work and help providers to come up with greener deliveries. Among other industry experts, Greenplan CEO Dr. Clemens Beckmann also finds mention explaining why new tour planning approaches were needed. According to Dr. Beckmann more efficient planning leads to a better use of resources and improves sustainability by reducing CO2-emissions: "This is a low-margin business and the cost pressure is very high, so efficiency is really key."

About Parcel and Postal Technology International magazine

Parcel and Postal Technology International is a leading magazine in the postal technology sector. The publication covers all the latest developments, trends and challenges in the industry including new investments in sorting hubs, delivery vehicles and digital platforms.

Green Lanes: New sustainability report about the power of tour planning algorithms

Supply Chain Management Startups Handbook 2021

Greenplan is listed in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) Startups Handbook 2021

This week the new SCM Startups Handbuch 2021 has been published. With the book, publisher Matthias Bosse offers a good overview of young and innovative companies in the field of the supply chain. In addition to meaningful company profiles, the handbook serves as a professional guide for industry experts and venture capitalists interested in supply chain and logistics innovations.

Compilation of more than 200 companies from 27 countries 

In total, the book includes 215 company profiles of startups or scale-ups from 27 European countries. The profiles include detailed product descriptions, feature overviews, and contact details. In addition, the so-called "SCM Startups Navigator" sorts all providers along with the corresponding market segments. This makes it possible to find the right provider for every application right away. 

Leading industry experts comment on innovations in the supply chain sector

In addition to the company profiles, the reader also gains an exciting insight into current logistics trends. 10 "Supply Chain" experts from well-known companies such as McKinsey, EY, IBM, DHL Consulting, or Fiege Logistics comment in detail on topics such as artificial intelligence, "Circular Economy", sustainability, "Internet of Things" and real-time monitoring.

Greenplan in Supply Chain Management Startups Handbook 2021

Amazon's official press release

In early 2021, Amazon launched the Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Transportation & Logistics. The competition aimed at optimized last-mile package delivery planning.

Despite enormous progress in tour optimization in recent years, there is still a noticeable gap between theoretical optimization and the actual implementation of tours. Particularly, in practice driver knowledge still primarily determines the course of a tour. The competition organized by Amazon, therefore, aimed to investigate how algorithms can learn the knowledge of experienced delivery and use these information for optimized last-mile delivery.

The mathematical approach to the problem is a new variant of the well-known Travelling Salesman Problem. This involves finding the shortest route through a large number of cities or parcel addresses. Whether efficient algorithms can be used for this problem or not directly relates to the "Millenium Problem P vs. NP".

Stephan Held, a member of the Greenplan research team, and his team find the most efficient results

Professor Dr. Stephan Held of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics and a member of the Greenplan development team at the University of Bonn participated in this year's competition among 2,285 attendees. Together with his teammates Keld Helsgaun (Denmark) and William Cook (Canada), he tried to solve the problem by further developing known combinatorial local search algorithms - with success. Stephan Held's team presented 42% better results than the runners-up from MIT. This exceptional achievement was rewarded with $100,000 in prize money.  

The team recognized a two-level hierarchical cluster structure in the driven tours, which leads to a new variant of the Traveling Salesperson Problem. They also extracted so-called sequence constraints between clusters from a known tour with a similar cluster structure. Such sequence constraints define, for example, that cluster A should be approached before B and C. This resulted in new disjunctive sequence constraints stating that clusters must be visited either in the order A, B, C, or in the order B, C, A.

Machine learning is not the preferred solution 

Interestingly, machine learning was not the preferred solution approach of the participants. Only 35% of all participating teams used machine learning techniques to solve the problem. According to Held, machine learning has not yet played a major role in combinatorial optimization problems such as the classical TSP, although much research on this topic is increasing. 

Held comments on his own approach as follows: "The hype around machine learning means that nowadays one almost has to justify not using these methods in discrete optimization. For me, a key motivation was to demonstrate the strengths of optimization algorithms, especially in a machine learning competition, which is based on a combinatorial optimization problem." 

The mathematician suspects that combinatorial algorithms (like Greenplan) will continue to be the future for route planning and optimization - possibly in combination with machine learning algorithms. 

A total of 220 teams from 22 countries participated in the competition. 45 teams made it to the final round.

Read the official press release from the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics here

Amazon Last Mile Routing Challenge

Exhibition pass

Home Delivery Asia 2021 is held as a fully virtual event

This year, Greenplan is part of Asia’s must-attend event for the retail logistics industry. Challenging times for deliverers with ever-growing e-commerce volumes are bringing together leading logistic experts to share their experiences and learnings from the past few months. The fully virtual event hosts live presentations, live panel debates, and digital round tables with various opinion leaders from retailers, e-commerce platforms, and online sellers. 

Over the 2 days, interesting topics including digital delivery trends, food and grocery delivery, last mile logistics, and warehouse and inventory management will be discussed. The conference will be hosted via Swapcards providing attendees with the chance to visit virtual booths, expand their network, and access innumerable hours of on-demand content.  

Greenplan’s CEO Dr. Clemens Beckmann will be speaking about tour planning intelligence on 7 July at 8:30 a.m. (CET)

As an official event partner, Greenplan will share insights about smart tour planning for last mile logistics. Visitors of the exhibition hall will learn more about the intelligent tour planning algorithm and can read through some case studies.

Furthermore, during the last mile stream Greenplan's CEO Dr. Clemens Beckmann will be speaking about the evolution of tour planning intelligence. In his presentation, he will highlight current drivers of intelligent tour planning in logistics and explain how artificial intelligence helps to excel in tour planning processes. Besides many strengths supporting better results for tours, certain limitations are requiring human knowledge. Dr. Beckmann concludes with an outlook about the evolution of urban deliveries once authorities start to more intensively steer traffic flows controlling air and noise congestion. 

Home Delivery Asia 2021 is organized by Terrapinn. Visitors can book a free exhibition pass to attend the virtual event. 

Dr. Clemens Beckmann speaking at Home Delivery Asia 2021

Conference program

Live and remote: this year's "City Transport and Road Pricing Conference" Europe presented by CiTTi Magazine und RUC Conference 

How has the transport infrastructure in Europe changed over the past years? Which consequences result for the logistics sector? These and many more topics will be discussed at this year's "City Transport & Road Pricing Conference" Europe from 11-12 May. The conference is structured along four main streams: Road pricing/tolling, congestion management, sustainability and emissions, and transportation infrastructure. In addition to interesting keynotes by several industry experts, networking and lively exchange among the attendees should be facilitated. The event will be hosted digitally and provides interesting insights into important trends in urban logistics.

Dr. Clemens Beckmann will be speaking at 12 May at 10:00 (a.m. CET) 

As part of the conference, Dr. Clemens Beckmann will be talking about "Optimized last mile deliveries – efficient and sustainable". In particular, he will outline the importance as well as challenges of tour planning and explain why automated processes are needed but will not replace the human knowledge of dispatchers. In the light of increasingly complex deliveries, Dr Beckmann points out how operators from different industries can overcome known challenges and thus, realize optimized tours.

The City Transport and Road Pricing Conference is organized by CiTTi Magazine and RUC Conference as the second iteration within an international series of online events exploring urban transportation and road pricing. The registration can be found here.

Greenplan as Partner of "City Transport and Road Pricing Conference" 2021

Greenplan Whitepaper

Increased cost and competitive pressure forces logistics operators to implement innovative solutions for last mile distribution

From growing urban mobility to increasing shipment volumes with complex customer expectations: today, logistic operations particularly on the last mile are exposed to various challenges. Increased complexity caused by (external) influencing factors and lacking investments in infrastructure impede efficiently as well as reliable service processes for end customers. Due to these rapid developments, operators and local authorities are equally under pressure. According to experts, innovative solutions are urgently needed to prevent a collapse of the urban delivery ecosystem.

Especially, technologies featuring digitized as well as automated operational processes and deliveries are continuously discussed. Apparently, many companies do not benefit from available solutions and thus, are lagging behind. Despite ongoing discussions, many solutions blunder into a conflict of objectives among operators, local authorities, and customers.

Optimized tour planning as an efficient tool for deliveries on the last mile

Apart from this conflict, tour optimization tends to offer great potential for more efficiency within urban delivery systems. In addition to improved routes helping to relieve city traffic or ease the predictability of shipments, tour optimization ensures better workforce and fleet utilization. Automated processes due to a higher digital maturity and the usage of intelligent software enable logistics service providers to benefit from optimized tours and disburden the urban ecosystem. Moreover, such applications offer remarkable cost-saving potential.

Inevitably, operators need to follow an implementation process before using intelligent tour planning tools. Today, cloud-based solutions coming as "software as a service"-package reduce integration efforts and ensure the rapid availability of such applications.

Despite all mentioned advantages and the fast deployment, many logisticians reveal difficulties regarding the introduction of digital planning systems. Yet, which factors are essential to consider and which obstacles are to overcome when implementing a modern tour planning solution?

Greenplan published Whitepaper for an introduction of tour planning software and the accompanying change management processes

Recently, Greenplan addressed this very question in a whitepaper named "Tour optimization in urban last mile". Within a qualitative data analysis, logisticians and other industry experts were interviewed about the status quo of the usage of digital planning tools. Thereby, relevant parameters for planning optimized routes on the last mile were identified and decisive impediments for necessary inter-company change management were discussed. 

The results indicate that there is no clear correlation between the type of tour planning or specific shipment volumes with regards to company size or underlying industry. However, findings prove that a more static and thus, manual tour planning approach leads to insufficient resource usage, data problems, missing standardization, lacking optimization know-how, and inefficient routes. Interestingly, in particular, companies, which tend to follow a rather inefficient tour planning approach assess their own processes as heavily digitized, technically mature, and highly efficient. Probably, this evaluation stems from a more emotional perspective. In turn, a more problem- as well as solution-oriented attitude towards the introduction of new technologies evokes a negative perception of necessary changes. 

Ongoing digitization and altering market conditions compel operators to adjust. Solutions for tour optimization should be implemented following a staged and iterative approach avoiding financial as well as operative risks. This provides a solid base for sustainable acceptance of change and empowers companies to pursue further change.

Gradual adoption of digitized tour planning  

Based on the results, a phased implementation roadmap for digital tour planning on the last mile was developed. The underlying concept contains a four-step selection process followed by a three-step action plan. During the selection processes service providers focus on the identification of processes offering the greatest potential for improvement through digitization. Subsequently, the action plan defines concrete steps for achieving a new digital maturity for all selected processes. Continuously challenging and running through the model adds value as well as acceptance. For most companies, external support can be particularly helpful regarding the self-evaluation and assessment of processes. 

We offer the whitepaper "Tour optimization in urban last mile: Strategic roadmap for a phased implementation of digital tour planning" containing a complete summary of the researched results as a free download.

The survey and the model for implementation of digitized tour optimization are part of a scientific thesis written by Kristin Dörfer in cooperation with Greenplan.

Greenplan whitepaper about tour optimization on the last mile

Discrete Mathematics for Green Route Planning: Scientific knowledge complements logistics expertise

Since 2017, the University of Bonn and Greenplan officially cooperate to find a viable solution for optimal tour planning. Over the past few years together with the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics, Greenplan has developed and launched an algorithm, which exploits the full optimization potential of smart tours. The algorithm, which runs as software as a service solution is already successfully implemented in practice. The cloud-based solution is applicable for a large group of customers ranging from logistics providers to field service operators. Due to its intelligent product design, Greenplan provides great potential for considerable cost savings and reductions in CO2-emissions. Last year, Greenplan received the PostEurop Innovation Award. Recently, the mathematicians from the University of Bonn led by Professor Jens Vygen succeeded in finding a better approximation ratio for the "Capacitated Vehicle Routing". This is the first one in 30 years. The authors Jannis Blauth, Vera Traub, and Jens Vygen will receive the Best Paper Award at IPCO 2021, which will be held in May and which is the worldwide leading conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization.

The General-Anzeiger Bonn reports in a detailed article (€; language German) about the idea of Greenplan and the underlying cooperation. 

The University of Bonn announces the continuation of the successful cooperation with Greenplan

Recently, the University of Bonn officially announced that the cooperation will now be continued for an unlimited period. In this context, Professor Jens Vygen outlined: “The collaboration with the logistic experts at Greenplan was very fruitful from the start. We developed an algorithm that is not only flexibly applicable but also delivers excellent results after only a short computation time.” Also, Dr. Clemens Beckmann - CEO of Greenplan - is happy about the new contract and the ongoing collaboration: "The great professionalism in the collaboration, as well as the geographical proximity, have been the basis for the extremely fast development, during which the logistic and scientific expertise complemented each other optimally. With the new contract, we have further strengthened our cooperation and we are looking forward to our future collaboration."

The official press release and more information about the University of Bonn as well as the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) can be found here.