Titulo Estágio
Posted-price search in multimodal container shipping service procurement
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas Inteligentes
Local do Estágio
CISUC
Enquadramento
The NEXUS Agenda consortium, led by the Port of Sines, comprises 35 partners who share a common goal of developing innovative solutions to achieve a Green and Digital Transition Agenda. The consortium represents the entire value chain, including port authorities, maritime and terminal operators, railway operators, carriers, dry ports, logistics operators, technology suppliers, importers, exporters, as well as universities and research institutes. The expertise and skills of these partners play a crucial role in realizing this pioneering Agenda.
Within the NEXUS framework, a key objective is the development of a service procurement platform allowing users to search for the best door-to-door container shipping service offers, including maritime, trucking and rail transportation. This work is part of Work Package 5 on Smart Logistics (WP5).
Objetivo
The main objective of this work is the development of a planning layer capable of generating optimised door-to-door shipping solutions with respect to price, transit time, and other service characteristics, by combining available information on different modes of transport to form appropriate routes in response to individual search queries. This entails integrating the service and price data provided by different carriers into appropriate network models to support efficient route search. The resulting routing problems are essentially shortest-path problems involving multiple objectives (final price, transit time) as well as other features, such as timetable information (where applicable) and layover fees, that add to their complexity.
Another important objective is the evaluation of the performance of the various routing approaches considered on real, or at least realistic-size, data sets with a view to the integration of the algorithms developed into the project’s service procurement platform.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
1. Familiarisation with the state of the art in route search in transportation networks, including network modelling approaches and route search algorithms
2. Construction of network models for a representative subset of shipping service data
3. Implementation of simple route-search algorithms
4. Intermediate report writing
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
1. Instantiation of larger multi-modal transportation network models
2. Development and implementation of advanced route-search algorithms
3. Experimental study
4. Evaluation and discussion of the methodologies adopted and the results achieved
5. Dissertation writing
Condições
Very good background in heuristic optimisation methods, algorithms and data structures. The work will be carried out in the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, in the scope of the Nexus research project (https://nexuslab.pt). A compute server is available to support the development and evaluation of the algorithms developed.
Project “Agenda Mobilizadora Sines Nexus”, ref. No. 7113, supported by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) and by the European Funds Next Generation EU, following Notice No. 02/C05-i01/2022, Component 5 - Capitalization and Business Innovation - Mobilizing Agendas for Business Innovation.
Orientador
Carlos Manuel Mira da Fonseca
cmfonsec@dei.uc.pt 📩