Overview
GLOBALOG is a multidisciplinary project promoted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation aimed at promoting logistics as competitiveness factor for business.
During its 4-years lifespan and with a total budget of € 8 million, twenty-seven agents including universities, public and private R&D centres, Port Authorities and relevant logistics companies have been involved in its development.
The main goal of the project was to increase the level of competitiveness of Spanish companies through the development of knowledge, methodologies and practices in the logistics files, exploiting the use of information and communication technologies favouring increased supply chain efficiency in a globalised environment.
The project included basic research on techniques and methods to improve the efficiency of supply chains and transport networks both from the perspective of available technologies and on a 15-year long-term view on prospected logistics developments.
The project was structured also into several sub-projects addressing to the optimization of all the mechanisms taking part in the management of the logistics processes in the different types of supply chains, such as industrial production and consumer sectors.
The project addresses in detail the modelling and simulation of supply chain functioning and behaviours, the development of advanced tools for supply chain management, as well as tools to increase the visibility of the flows by the agents themselves.
From a macroeconomic point of view, logistics infrastructures were analysed on a national scale and tools developed to analyse the impact of infrastructures on logistics efficiency in order to facilitate decision-making for companies with regard to the design of their supply and distribution networks. Lastly, a series of practices and methodologies were developed to be applied by the companies in order to achieve better environmental sustainability of logistics processes, specifically of what is known as reverse logistics.
Funding
Results
The work carried out within the Subproject 5 (Logistics Infrastructures) by the Integrated Group for Engineering Research (GII) of the University of A Coruña (Spain) concerned modelling and long-term analysis of multimodal transportation networks, leading to the first complete multi-regional maritime-road multimodal freight transportation model in Spain.
Road and maritime-road multimodal mode choices have been analysed and fitted to a model based on historical data. Along with provided origin-destination matrices, a model for mode distribution forecasting has been implemented in the TransCAD transport planning software. A set of scenarios of cuts in port services fees and reductions in maritime transportation times has been analysed.