The Executive Board has appointed Martijn Mes as full professor Transportation and Logistics Management. The chair is part of the High Tech Business and Entrepreneurship (HBE) department at the faculty Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS).
The emphasis of the chair Transportation and Logistics Management is on smart and sustainable logistics. "The logistics sector is facing an era of unprecedented change", Mes emphasizes. "With developments in digitisation, autonomous vehicles, urbanization, the growth of e-commerce, increasing customer demands and, above all, the necessity for more sustainable solutions." The transportation industry has a big share in greenhouse gas emissions. "The increasing focus on sustainability will drive developments towards more efficient logistics and the use of alternative fuels and transport modes."
Industry under pressure
The continuous growth of the e-commerce industry puts the logistics sector under pressure. Particularly in the ‘last mile’ and urban logistics. The effects are amplified by urbanization. "We will see an increased focus on how to efficiently manage urban freight distribution. But also on how to efficiently use new delivery concepts, like autonomous vehicles, delivery robots and drones, parcel lockers, and shared mobility concepts", Mes continues. "Furthermore, developments in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will have a huge impact on the planning and execution of logistics flows, but also on the human role in this. Logistics planners will need more collaborative, cognitive and analytical competencies (interpreting, analysing and conceptualizing information). Live-long learning might become the norm."
People, planet, profit
All of these developments bring opportunities to the logistics sector to increase its competitiveness and to cope with the beforementioned societal challenges. The focus of this Transportation and Logistics Management chair is on analysing the potential of new technological innovations and how to best use these technologies to improve logistics processes from a people, planet and profit perspective. "I look forward to contributing to this through impactful research and teaching in the exciting world of logistics", Mes concludes.
About Martijn Mes
Martijn has over 20 years of experience in optimizing logistics operations using techniques from operations research and artificial intelligence. After finishing his PhD on transportation planning with intelligent software agents in 2008, he did his postdoc at Princeton University on logistics planning supported by machine learning. Martijn participated in numerous research and implementation projects on the topics of sustainable logistics, urban logistics, port logistics, and intermodal and synchromodal transport. Currently, Martijn serves as chair of the Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems section within the HBE department.
