Seminar "Capacity planning in consolidated transport and logistics".

Capacity planning can be described as the process of establishing the quantity and type of resources required to satisfy demand.

The seminar focuses on the field of consolidated freight transport and logistics (T&L), in particular, on medium- and long-term planning of service supply to satisfy demand.

The adequate representation of "capacity", in other words, the main characteristics of freight transport or storage units, as well as the utilization of this capacity by demand-generated flows, is of great importance in the planning of T&L systems with consolidation. However, in many cases, the classical operations research approach offers only a poor approximation to these phenomena. The explicit integration of "packing" considerations into planning models appears to be a very promising methodological approach, but little explored to date.

The seminar will start with a brief review of the T&L domain with consolidation, the main types of players in this field with their capacity planning issues. The family of transportation service planning models will illustrate the classical approach to capacity representation.

We will then present a synthesis of the literature on the integration of packing and capacity planning, and present some recent contributions.

We will conclude with a discussion of research challenges and prospects in the field.

Teodor Gabriel Crainic is Full Professor of Operations Research, Transportation and Logistics, and Chair of Intelligent Logistics and Transportation Systems Planning at the School of Management, Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal, and Senior Scientist at CIRRELT, the Interuniversity Research Center for Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation, where he is Director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory.

Professor Crainic is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada - The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada. In 1991, he co-founded TRISTAN - TRienial Symposium on Transportation Analysis and, in 2000, the Odysseus - International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics series of international meetings. He sits on several editorial boards. He has served as President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS, as Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (now CIRRELT), and received the 2006 Award of Merit from the Canadian Operational Research Society.

Professor Crainic's research focuses on network optimization, integer and combinatorial optimization, meta-heuristics and parallel computing applied to the planning and management of complex systems, particularly in the fields of transportation and logistics. His main contributions cover the design, programming and management of consolidation-based transportation services, including uncertainty, resource and revenue management considerations, as well as vehicle routing and programming, intelligent transportation systems, urban logistics, new commercial and organizational transportation and logistics models and systems, multi-modal and multi-party urban and interurban freight transport system planning at all geographical scales, etc.

Professor Crainic has published over 290 scientific articles and chapters, and has an h index of 78 (Google Scholar). He co-edited the book Network Design with Applications in Transportation and Logistics published by Springer in 2021, as well as numerous special issues of leading scientific journals. He has supervised over 160 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.