Flexible Logistics and Operations for sustainable WorldS FLOWS focuses on the management of goods flows in industrial systems in disrupted contexts, on all decision-making scales (strategic, tactical, operational), on all physical scales (workshop, factory, internal supply chain, external supply chain), on all issues linked to uncertainties (robustness, agility, resilience) and sustainability (impacts, reverse logistics, recycling).

The aim is to develop decision-support tools capable of taking full account of the risks and opportunities (uncertainties) facing players in supply chains. It is based on the exploitation of the now numerous data available from the various information systems present in supply chains (ERP, APS, connected objects, M2M, TMS, WMS, etc.).

 

Fields of application

In practical terms, the axis' work focuses mainly on production, distribution, transport and planning activities.

 

Scientific challenges

This area focuses on two types of problem:

• new control logics that need to be evaluated and instrumented (Physical Internet, DDMRP, digital twins),
• decision support for specific decision-making situations (strategic resilience and decision-making, tactical planning under fuzzy uncertainty, reverse supply chain design, dynamic routing of logistics flows, order book management in the face of hazards), for which an integration of different decision support issues is required (data-based modeling, operational research, multi-objective optimization, simulation, machine learning).

 

Methodological approaches

The subjects studied result from the confrontation between issues raised by industrial partners and scientific challenges. To date, several themes have emerged.

• Physical Internet

How to implement a physical Internet approach to meet the challenges of massifying sporadic flows, integrating hyperconnected supply chains, and developing hyper-flexible production units.

• Planning under uncertainty

Integration of tactical and strategic planning, decision support for planning that takes robustness and resilience into account, data-driven modeling of a planning problem and its uncertainties, anomaly detection and replanning on the fly, integration of planning problems (distribution, rounds).

• Digital twins for production systems

Multi-level modeling (simulation, PLNE, equivalent models) and decision-making (decision redistribution induced by digital twins, Twin for advanced planning), enriched situational awareness, human roles in a loop with Digital Twin.

• Instrumenting the circular economy

Steering agile supply chains, chain design including reverse logistics, product traceability and impact measurement.

• Industrial system performance management

Multi-scale, multi-level, multi-temporal, omni-uncertainty steering using the Physic Of Decisions paradigm.

 

POSITIONING OF THE AXIS IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

Work in this area is supported by an extensive, international network of academic and industrial partners.

Helping industrial organizations manage the flow of goods is a long-standing theme of industrial engineering, and of the center in particular. There are numerous partnerships on these subjects with manufacturers (PIERRE FABRE, Airbus, Figeac Aéro, SCALIAN, Veolia, etc.) and software publishers (AGILEA Conseil, Siemens, Immersive Factory). The Centre Génie Industriel aims to bring them to a high level of maturity by continuing beyond the pilot scale with certain partners (Toulouse Tech Transfer, AGILEA Conseil).

The research team is involved in several groups in the national SAGIP community (Flux Logistiques, Jumeaux Numériques, IMS2, Origin, IngeFutur, etc.), in the Institut Mines-Télécom “Production Systems” community (Jumeaux Numériques chair), and in the AIF “Jumeaux Numériques” working group.

At international level, the FLOWS axis is involved in several learned societies: IFAC TC 5.2, Interop VLAb, SOCOLNET, IPIC. The FLOWS axis is involved in the Siren Lab international associate laboratory, in partnership with Georgia Tech's School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISYE), on physical Internet topics.

On the academic side, the axis has also organized a dense network of partnerships, enabling it to establish its legitimacy and extend its expertise in the field. These include collaborations with IRIT and GSCOP at national level, and with Georgia Tech, Polytechnique Montreal, Beijing Jiaotong University, Michigan State University and Valencia University at international level.

These interactions ensure that the research carried out in this area is relevant to the industrial issues being addressed, and that the proposed scientific contributions add significant value to the current state of knowledge on the subject.