Frank Meisel

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Kiel University

Aims and Scope: The analysis and optimization of manufacturing and logistics processes has been an active field of academic research in the past that generated important insights for theory and management practice. However, the evolution of automation, digitalization and human-technology interaction renders reality more complex and thus gives rise...

This essay reflects on the changes, challenges, and proposed solutions in urban mobility and logistics over time. Thereby, it aims to provide a reference framework for a wide audience of new researchers, researchers lacking a background in transport, and specialists looking for a broader perspective for inspiration. It sheds light on the past, pres...

In order to reach the two-degree target set by the Paris Agreement and to avoid rising costs due to \(\mathrm {CO_2}\) allowances and taxes, \(\mathrm {CO_2}\) intensive industry sectors like cement, steel and chemicals may opt for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) solutions. CCS involves capturing \(\mathrm {CO_2}\) emissions at the source points,...

Sustainability is a common concern in intermodal transport. Collaboration among carriers may help in reducing emissions. In this context, this work establishes a collaborative planning model for intermodal transport and uses eco-labels (a series of different levels of emission ranges) to reflect shippers' sustainability preferences. A mathematical...

Eco-labels are a way to benchmark transportation shipments with respect to their environmental impact. In contrast to an eco-labeling of consumer products, emissions in transportation depend on several operational factors like the mode of transportation (e.g., train or truck) or a vehicle’s current and potential future capacity utilization when new...

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the process of capturing \(\mathrm {CO_2}\) before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and then storing the \(\mathrm {CO_2}\) in a permanent underground storage site. CCS is projected to play an important role for compliance with the temperature degree goals set by the Paris Agreement, and with this in mi...

We study a single trade ship routing and scheduling problem for a roll-on roll-off shipping company. Along the given trade, there is a number of contracts for transportation of cargoes between port pairs. Each contract states a minimum service frequency where the services should be evenly separated in time and possibly transit time requirements. Cu...

The idea of eco‐labeling is to provide customers with an easy‐to‐understand signal regarding the ecological impact of using a product or service. With this paper, we propose an eco‐labeling system for freight transportation. We discuss design options based on a common emission reporting standard and a related communication protocol. We further expl...

Nowadays, the rural population is still dependent on motorized individual transportation due to the little offers of public transport there. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to close this mobility gap as shifting the task of driving from humans to machines facilitates new possibilities for vehicle sharing and lifts economical and service time...

Increasing yet volatile generation of electricity from renewable energy sources constitutes challenges to prevent grid bottlenecks and to ensure grid stability. Similarly, energy-intensive industrial companies have to take care of their internal power load management to prevent energy infrastructure overloads. We bring these two fields together by...

As large cities continue growing, the pressure on public transportation system increases. Water transit infrastructure has gained increased interest for coastal cities in the last years as it presents great potential for reducing congestion on urban road networks. Furthermore, the evolution of autonomous ferry systems enables more frequent departur...

Eco-labels are a way to benchmark transportation shipments with respect to their environmental impact. In contrast to an eco-labeling of consumer products, emissions in transportation depend on several operational factors like the mode of transportation (e.g., train or truck) or a vehicle's current and potential future capacity utilization when new...

This paper studies the Aquaculture Service Vessel Routing Problem (ASVRP), which is an important planning problem arising in sea-based fish farming. In the ASVRP, there is a set of fish farms located in the sea, where each fish farm has one or more service tasks to be performed by a given heterogeneous fleet of service vessels with different capabi...

As the COVID-19 pandemic motivated a shift to virtual teaching, exams have increasingly moved online too. Detecting cheating through collusion is not easy when tech-savvy students take online exams at home and on their own devices. Such online at-home exams may tempt students to collude and share materials and answers. However, online exams’ digita...

Der Nord-Ostsee-Kanal ist eine von vielen künstlichen Wasserstraßen weltweit, die zur Verkürzung von Seereisewegen angelegt wurden. Viele dieser Wasserstraßen weisen baulich bedingte Engstellen auf, welche die Verkehrsströme behindern und Verkehrsregelungen für die Schifffahrt erfordern. Diese Engstellen führen bei hohem Schiffsverkehrsaufkommen zu...

The substantial amount of energy consumed through industrial production has given rise to a large number of research papers that incorporate environmental aspects and increased energy-awareness into production management. Nowadays, initiatives that push sustainable energy sources like wind and solar power together with new technologies for on-site...

Container ports require specialized, powerful crane equipment at the quay, in the yard area, and at their hinterland interfaces for quickly serving ships, trains, and external trucks. A highly productive usage of this equipment calls for an optimization of crane operations. This article provides technical details of the most relevant types of crane...

Zahlreiche Aktivitäten bezüglich der Entwicklung autonomer Fahrzeuge und der hierdurch ermöglichten neuartigen Mobilitätsdienstleistungssysteme konzentrieren sich stark auf urbane Verkehre und Autobahnverkehre (Boennec und Rémy; Nicolaï, Isabelle; Da Costa, Pascal,.Transport Policy 83:13–25, 2019).

We consider a combined problem of teaming and scheduling of multi-skilled employees that have to perform jobs with uncertain qualification requirements. We propose two model-ing approaches that generate solutions that are robust to possible data variations. Both approaches use variants of budgeted uncertainty, where deviations in qualification requ...

The Kiel Canal is a two-way waterway that connects the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The canal consists of an alternating sequence of narrow transit segments and wider siding segments. This calls for solving a ship scheduling problem to decide which ships have to wait in sidings to let opposing traffic pass through such that the total traversing ti...

The integrated item-sharing and crowdshipping problem arises from the operational planning of sharing platforms that coordinate diverse services offered by individuals to peers. Item-sharing means to rent-out items whereas crowdshipping describes the willingness of private drivers to conduct deliveries on their planned trips. Integrating both conce...

We consider a combined problem of teaming and scheduling of multi-skilled employees that have to perform jobs with uncertain qualification requirements. We propose two modeling approaches that generate solutions that are robust to possible data variations. Both approaches use variants of budgeted uncertainty, where deviations in qualification requi...

We consider a combined manpower routing and scheduling problem for performing spatially distributed jobs that demand one or more skilled workers. In particular, we investigate how the staffing can be updated for new jobs that occur within the planning horizon. We address this by interday planning and intraday rescheduling strategies under team cons...

The problem addressed in this paper seeks for an optimal routing of freight orders through an intermodal transportation network. We consider the case of environmentally aware customers that request to ship orders with no more than a specified amount of greenhouse gases, which establishes so-called emission limits. In order to ensure that a routing...

There is a strong political focus on moving cargo transportation from trucks to ships to reduce environmental emissions and road congestion. We study how the introduction of a future generation of autonomous ships can be utilized in maritime transportation systems to become more cost-efficient, and as such contribute in the shift from land to sea....

This paper considers a ferry service network design problem using autonomous ferries for the practical case of the Kiel fjord. Among others, the city of Kiel, Germany, currently runs a number of initiatives for developing an autonomous ferry system to open up new mobility opportunities. The city is divided by the Kiel fjord into an eastern and a we...

The development of autonomous ships is at an advanced stage. It seems to be just a question of time before such ships become available at an industrial scale. In this paper, we investigate the economic advantages of utilizing autonomous over conventional ships. We consider a shipping network composed of conventional mother ships and autonomous daug...

There is a strong political focus on moving cargo transportation from trucks to ships to reduce environmental emissions and road congestion. We study how the introduction of a future generation of autonomous ships can be utilized in maritime transportation systems to become more cost-efficient, and as such contribute in the shift from land to sea....

This paper proposes different network structures for a real liner shipping company to serve demands between Norwegian and European continental ports. The current practice of the shipping company deploys a feeder network where all routes depart from the European port. We study the impact of using a hub-and-spoke network that is composed of mother an...

In this paper we consider the sourcing process of a production facility from the process industry. The production facility sources raw materials from a set of suppliers that offer different discount schemes. For storing raw materials, heterogeneous storage facilities can be used, which vary with respect to their associated costs and capacities. We...

We consider a new problem of planning interrelated voyages with separation requirements along a single trade in roll-on roll-off shipping. Along a given trade with a sequence of port calls, there is a number of contracts for transportation of cargoes between the different port pairs, where each contract states its service frequency as well as that...

In workforce routing and scheduling there are many applications in which differently skilled workers must perform jobs that occur at different locations, where each job requires a particular combination of skills. In many such applications, a group of workers must be sent out to provide all skills required by a job. Examples are found in maintenanc...

The item-sharing and crowdshipping problem combines two concepts of the sharing economy, namely item-sharing and crowdshipping. Item-sharing is about renting items among members of a sharing community. Crowdshipping addresses the transportation of these items through private people on trips they make anyway. The considered problem is to decide (1.)...

The Kiel Canal is an artificial waterway of about 100 km that connects the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. It allows ships to save several hundred kilometers of travel distance compared with going around the Jutland Peninsula (Denmark). Since the canal contains several narrow segments where large ships cannot pass each other, it needs to be decided o...

Intermodal rail/road transportation combines advantages of both modes of transport and is often seen as an effective approach for reducing the environmental impact of freight transportation. This is because it is often expected that rail transportation emits less greenhouse gases than road transportation. However, the actual emissions of both modes...

This paper presents a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for the exact solution of the active-passive vehicle-routing problem (APVRP). The APVRP covers a range of logistics applications where pickup-and-delivery requests necessitate a joint operation of active vehicles (e.g., trucks) and passive vehicles (e.g., loading devices such as containers or...

Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Reduktion von Emissionen in der Transportlogistik. Er beschreibt zum einen generelle Herausforderungen, wie beispielsweise die Bilanzierung und Allokation transportbedingter Emissionen, die für alle Verkehrsträger relevant sind. Zum anderen werden spezifische Aspekte des Straßen-, Eisenbahn-, See-und Luftverkehrs erlä...

Item-sharing and crowdshipping are two concepts of the sharing economy. In item-sharing, members of a sharing community can temporarily rent items such as tools or leisure equipment from one another. In crowdshipping, private drivers offer to execute delivery jobs for other people on trips they would make anyway. Since the peer-to-peer exchange in...

Due to the important role suppliers play in the generation of customer value today, supplier development has attracted the attention of many companies in recent years. One challenge companies wishing to engage in supplier development face is to select both the right suppliers for supplier development as well as adequate supplier development measure...

Verbesserte Informations‐ und Kommunikationstechnologien, das Bedürfnis nach nachhaltigeren Formen des Konsums und wirtschaftliche Vorteile durch gemeinsam genutzte Ressourcen sind nur einige Gründe dafür, dass der Sharing Economy ein großes Wachstumspotenzial zugeschrieben wird [9]. Ein Wachstum wird vor allem in Ballungsräumen erwartet, da insbes...

Nowadays, many industries rely on cranes for efficiently executing storage and retrieval operations of goods. Areas of application are, for instance, container logistics in seaports and warehousing operations in automated storage and retrieval systems. Therefore, it is not astounding that plenty scientific papers on crane scheduling in many differe...

We consider the problem of designing supply networks for producing and distributing goods under restricted customer order lead times. Companies apply various instruments for fulfilling orders within preset lead times, like locating facilities close to markets, producing products to stock, choosing fast modes of transportation, or delivering product...

This paper surveys recent publications on berth allocation, quay crane assignment, and quay crane scheduling problems in seaport container terminals. It continues the survey of Bierwirth and Meisel (2010) that covered the research up to 2009. Since then, there was a strong increase of activity observed in this research field resulting in more than...

Intermodal rail/road transportation is an instrument of green logistics, which may help reducing transport related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In order to assess the environmental impact of road and rail transports, researchers have formulated very detailed microscopic models, which determine vehicle emissions precisely based on a vast number o...

Urban green spaces provide various social and environmental benefits that strongly improve the quality of life in a city. Municipalities are responsible for maintaining their green spaces in order to preserve these potentials. This paper supports municipalities in planning the transportation and disposal logistics of the green waste that is produce...

This paper addresses the problem of designing Make-to-Order (MTO) driven supply networks as is faced by producers of industrial goods. A major challenge in MTO network design is to estimate the operational performance of candidate networks. In particular, the stochastic and dynamic nature of order arrivals and fulfilment processes as well as the ne...

We consider a routing problem for ambulances in a disaster response scenario, in which a large number of injured people require medical aid at the same time. The ambulances are used to carry medical personnel and patients. We distinguish two groups of patients: slightly injured people who can be assisted directly in the field, and seriously injured...

This paper addresses a routing problem where the fulfillment of transport requests requires two types of transport resources, namely, passive and active means of transport. The passive means are used for holding the cargo that is to be shipped from pickup to delivery locations. The active means take up the passive means and carry them from one loca...

We present a model and solution approach for combining production and intermodal transportation planning in a supply network. A close and detailed integration of both decision fields is missing in the literature so far. The model includes relevant decisions regarding production setups and output volumes of plants, cargo consolidation at intermodal...

We investigate a combined routing and scheduling problem for the maintenance of electricity networks. In electricity networks power lines must be regularly maintained to ensure a high quality of service. For safety reasons a power line must be physically disconnected from the network before maintenance work can be performed. After completing mainte...

The new concept for integrated seaside operations planning comprises a deep integration of the BAP and the QCAP. The resulting problem, namely the Berth Allocation and Crane Assignment Problem (BACAP), is studied within this chapter. The first mathematical formulation of the combined problem of berth allocation and crane assignment has been present...

This paper presents a model for the daily planning of health care services carried out at patients' homes by staff members of a home care company. The planning takes into account individual service requirements of the patients, individual qualifications of the staff and possible interdependencies between different service operations. Interdependenc...

In seaport container terminals, berth allocation, quay crane assignment, and quay crane scheduling problems are solved sequentially. However, this sequential way of planning the seaside operations often hinders obtaining a sufficient resource utilization and service quality at low cost. This paper provides a framework for aligning all decisions tha...

Intermodal rail/road freight transport constitutes an alternative to long-haul road transport for the distribution of large volumes of goods. The paper introduces the intermodal transportation problem for the tactical planning of mode and service selection. In rail mode, shippers either book train capacity on a per-unit basis or charter block train...

The quay crane scheduling problem is a core task of managing maritime container terminals. In this planning problem, discharge and load operations of containers of a ship are scheduled on a set of deployed quay cranes. In this paper, we provide a rich model for quay crane scheduling that covers important issues of practical relevance like crane-ind...

In logistics networks, service providers offer on-site services to the customers. Often, there is a need to synchronize the routes of vehicles that provide such services. Synchronization is required for example in case of a heterogeneous fleet of serving vehicles, where large vehicles carry goods and supply small vehicles, which distribute the good...

Supplier selection and supplier development are important activities of companies for establishing effective and reliable sources for materials and components. A large number of studies provide decision support for supplier selection but a lack of planning tools is observed for supplier development. This paper provides a combined approach for selec...

The quay crane scheduling problem consists of scheduling tasks for loading and unloading containers on cranes that are assigned to a vessel for its service. This article introduces a new approach for quay crane scheduling, where the availability of cranes at a vessel is restricted to certain time windows. The problem is of practical relevance, beca...

Synchronization of vehicle operations plays an important role for logistics service providers. Examples of logistics businesses with synchronization requirements can be found, e. g., in swap trailer transportation and truck-meets-truck traffic. In this paper, we provide a classification of the various types of synchronization requirements for trans...

Scheduling of quay cranes at container terminals is a field of growing interest in research and practice. In the literature, we find diverse models for quay crane scheduling that consider the service of container vessels at different levels of detail. Currently, however, there exists no basis to compare the quality of planning that is achieved from...

The length of the quay and the number of quay cranes are crucial determinants for the handling capacity and the service quality of seaport container terminals. The appropriate dimensioning of these two resources is dealt with when the layout and the equipment are planned for a new terminal. For terminals in operation, however, the expansion of exi...

This article provides an overview of operational planning and scheduling problems at seaport container terminals. It considers problems that deal with the seaside resources of a terminal, namely the berth space and the quay cranes, in detail. The corresponding problems of berth allocation, crane assignment, and crane scheduling are investigated in...

Fast handling of vessels is one of the most important goals in container terminal operations planning. In recent studies, quay crane double cycling has been investigated to accelerate the service of vessels. In our paper, we show that the service process can be further accelerated by changing the treatment of so-called reshuffle containers. Reshuff...

Due to the variety of technical equipments and terminal layouts, research has produced a multitude of optimization models for seaside operations planning in container terminals. To provide a support in modeling problem characteristics and in suggesting applicable algorithms this paper reviews the relevant literature. For this purpose new classifica...

This paper considers the problem of scheduling quay cranes which are used at sea port container terminals to load and unload containers. This problem is studied intensively in a recent stream of research but still lacks a correct treatment of crane interference constraints. We present a revised optimization model for the scheduling of quay cranes a...

In this chapter different concepts for an integrated solution of seaside planning problems are discussed. Section 5.1 assesses a sequential solution process of the focused problems and provides a theoretical framework for an integrated solution of optimization problems. Following these ideas, a survey of published integration concepts for the seasi...

Having investigated the BACAP, the QCSP, and the QCSPTW in detail in previous chapters, it is now turned to an integration of these problems. This study completes the realization of the integration concept that has been designed in Chapter 5. Section 8.1 outlines the functional integrations of crane scheduling into the berth planning phase in the c...

In this chapter the operational planning problems of a CT are informally described. In Section 3.1 a distinction of planning levels is discussed. The planning of seaside operations, internal operations, landside operations, and workforce utilization are described in Sections 3.2 to 3.5, respectively.

Due to the variety of technical equipments and terminal layouts, research has produced a multitude of optimization models for seaside operations planning in container terminals. This chapter provides literature surveys for the operations planning problems being in the focus of the thesis. Section 4.1 provides a classification scheme and a literatur...

This chapter deals with the QCSP on the basis of container groups. It is studied as an isolated problem here and functionally integrated into the BACAP in the next chapter. Crane scheduling for container groups has been introduced by Kim and Park (2004). As noted by Moccia et al. (2006), the original QCSP model provided by Kim and Park shows an ina...

The Berth Allocation Problem consists of assigning berthing times and berthing positions to container vessels calling at a seaport. We extend this problem by a so-called cut-and-run option, which is used in practice to ensure that vessels meet their liner schedules. A mathematical problem formulation, meta-heuristics, and computational tests are pr...

In this paper, the combined problem of berth allocation and crane assignment in container terminals is investigated. The proposed problem formulation includes important real world aspects such as the decrease of marginal productivity of quay cranes assigned to a vessel and the increase in handling time if vessels are not berthed at their desired po...

This chapter provides an introduction to the maritime container transport industry. Section 2.1 briefly describes the development of maritime container transport and the observed trends within the last decades. The organization of container transports is explained in Section 2.2. In Section 2.3 the layout of a container terminal and the available e...

Container terminals in seaports constitute interfaces between sea and land transport of goods in global transport chains. These logistics facilities face an increasing demand of service capacity, as is reflected by a tremendous growth in the worldwide container transshipments per year. For example, the top twenty terminals in the world showed an av...

The thesis deals with seaside operations planning in seaport container terminals. The investigated planning problems are the Berth Allocation Problem (BAP), the Quay Crane Assignment Problem(QCAP), and theQuay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP). From solving these problems, berthing times, berthing positions, and crane capacity are assigned to vessels...

This talk deals with the combination of two decision problems, which occur consecutively while planning the charge and discharge operations of container ships in container terminals. The Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) considers the allocation of ships to berths in the course of time. The Crane Assignment Problem (CAP) addresses the assignment of qu...