Logistics : Perspectives, Approaches & Challenges

Logistics is the management of the flow of resources between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet some requirements. The resources managed in logistics can include physical items such as food, materials, equipment, liquids, and staff as well as abstract items such as information, particles, and energy. This book discusses the perspectives, approaches and challenges of logistics relating to varied targets. Topics include comprehensive logistic models involving supply chains and food distribution; high density approaches to accommodating logistics activity in urban cities; logistics of hurricane evacuation in Hurricane Ike; solving routing problems using ant colonies optimisation and a parallel architecture with GPUs; the benefits and obstacles to e-business adoption in the freight and logistics sector; and multi-echelon freight distribution systems as an innovative tool for increasing logistic operations efficiency.