Research of the Operations Research and Logistics Group
Mission
Our research projects focus on decision making in the domain of agrifood and biobased supply chain. Central in these projects is the increasing complexity and uncertainty, as well as the specific characteristics of our domain. Our work supports organisations in
achieving robust performance, including the trade-offs between costs, service, quality and sustainability.
Objectives
We have the following three main objectives
- To identify, analyse and understand developments in the life sciences (with emphasis on sustainability, technology and quality management) that put new requirements on logistics concepts and decision support models in the specific domains;
- To contribute to further developing innovative and sustainable logistics concepts and models given the continuous changes in the environment;
- To further develop dedicated decision support models and tools that are able to deal with the specific characteristics and the increased complexity and uncertainty of the given domains, and enable the assessment and application of the newly developed concepts.
Our contributions primarily take the form of publications of the developed innovative concepts as well as of the concrete models and algorithms. The conceptual output is underpinned and clarified by empirical experiments with the implemented optimisation and simulation models, often conducted in collaboration with practice.
Research framework
Central in the problem characteristics of our research projects is increasing decision making complexity, dynamics and uncertainty whilst dealing with the specific characteristics of our domain. Organisations are striving for robust performances, not only on costs but also regarding the trade-off between product availability, product quality and supply chain sustainability. We aim to design robust agrifood supply chain networks with emphasis on logistics network design and management. Essential is a multidisciplinary research approach that combines advances in the fields of Logistics Management and Operations Research with expertise (methods, models and views) from typical Wageningen University & Research domains (e.g. food sciences, plant sciences, environmental sciences) and advances in technology (such as ICT and process technology) (Figure 1). Our research can be summarised as model-based design of logistics systems in agribusiness and food supply chains.
