Baggage handling at airports is among the most complex tasks for material handling: Baggage handling systems form a large-scale conveying network connecting multiple sources and sinks. Also, they are used in a very dynamic environment: Many airports grow rapidly on average but have to absorb significant variance in passenger numbers at the same time. Therefore, baggage-handling systems that are flexible regarding expansions or modifications are desirable. This can be realized by using a highly modular approach with each module containing its own control. This results in self-organized systems, which are also known as the Internet of Things in facility logistics. However, it is necessary to quantify resulting advantages in monetary terms to compare them with additional costs like necessary RFID tags. In this paper, we analyze a conventional and two possible implementations of self-organized baggage handling systems for a reference airport on the base of all relevant life-cycle costs. To account for the dynamic nature of expansion flexibility, we use a dynamic programming approach. The data for the reference scenario was carefully collected by evaluating public and non-public sources and is provided in this paper. Results suggest that self-organized systems can decrease life-cycle costs of typical baggage handling systems, and that savings exceed the costs of necessary RFID tags.

This paper introduces a bi-objective winner determination problem which arises in the procurement of transportation contracts via combinatorial auctions where bundle bidding is possible. The problem is modelled as a bi-objective extension to the set covering problem. We consider both the minimisation of the total procurement costs and the maximisation of the service-quality level at which the transportation contracts are executed. Taking into account the size of real-world transport auctions, a solution method has to cope with problems of up to some hundred contracts and a few thousand bundle bids. To solve the problem, we propose a bi-objective branch-and-bound algorithm and eight variants of a multiobjective genetic algorithm. Artificial benchmark instances that comply with important economic features of the transport domain are introduced to evaluate the methods. The branch-and-bound approach is able to find the optimal trade-off solutions in reasonable time for very small instances only. The eight variants of the genetic algorithm are compared among each other by means of large instances. The best variant is also evaluated using the small instances with known optimal solutions. The results indicate that the performance largely depends on the initialisation heuristic and suggest also that a well-balanced combination of genetic operators is crucial to obtain good solutions.

Dear Readers, Change in the world of academic publications is no less dramatic than in the ‘‘real’’ world of the economy. This seems to be true especially in our part of the world, the applied sciences of management, engineering, economics, operations research, and logistics—except: the direction is different! While the challenge to many ‘‘real world’’ businesses and to policy and decision makers of the recent years has been to cope with a precipitous decline in demand, production, and financial supplies in many industries, we see and foresee an equally dramatic rise in the demand for opportunities to publish academic work. The observations that I make in our German-language and broader European academic community suggest that the pressures to ‘‘publish or perish’’ are increasing now far beyond the levels of the past. More precisely, it is now ‘‘publish in A- and B-ranked journals…or else!’’ for academics working on their careers and reputation. Some reasons are obvious: • Where there are respected and accepted national journals in their respective languages (other than English), these are declining in importance. Papers of whatever quality, which are published there, are rapidly losing their value on resumes and publications lists. • The competition between universities for positions of excellence has become as global as the competition between international corporations in markets in the automotive and electronics industries, and elsewhere. The primary, if not the exclusive yardstick by which excellence is measured is their output in highly ranked journals. • Last but not least: the practice of writing dissertations and habilitation research is rapidly shifting from the traditional monograph-type, book-length piece of research to ‘‘cumulative’’ dissertations and habilitation volumes, where three, four, or more refereed journal publications are bound together. Some estimates that I have—just from the German ‘‘demand’’ for A and B journal publications—suggest that in the next few years an additional 40 to 60 aspiring Ph.D. students in the field of logistics and supply chain management will want to place their three or more papers in A and B journals per annum to substitute what used to be monograph dissertations. And that is just Germany, accounting for less than a quarter of the European