This book deals with complex problems in the fields of logistics and supply chain management
and discusses advanced methods especially from the field of computational intelligence (CI)
for solving them. The first two chapters provide general introductions to logistics and supply
chain management on the one hand and to computational intelligence on the other hand. The
subsequent chapters cover specific fields in logistics and supply chain management work out
the most relevant problems found in those fields and discuss approaches for solving them.
Chapter 3 discusses problems in the field of production and inventory management. Chapter 4
considers planning activities on a finer level of granularity which is usually denoted as
scheduling. In chapter 5 problems in transportation planning such as different types of vehicle
routing problems are considered. While chapters 3 to 5 rather discuss planning problems which
appear on an operative level chapter 6 discusses the strategic problem of designing a supply
chain or network. The final chapter provides an overview of academic and commercial software
and information systems for the discussed applications. There appears to be a gap between
general textbooks on logistics and supply chain management and more specialized literature
dealing with methods for computational intelligence operations research etc. for solving the
complex operational problems in these fields. For readers it is often difficult to proceed
from introductory texts on logistics and supply chain management to the sophisticated
literature which deals with the usage of advanced methods. This book fills this gap by
providing state-of-the-art descriptions of the corresponding problems and suitable methods for
solving them.
