Management of mobile resources in Physical Internet logistic models

This paper deals with the concept of a “Physical Internet”, the idea of building large logistics systems like the very successful Digital Internet network. The idea is to handle mobile resources, such as containers, just like Internet data packets. Thus, it is possible to use the principles of encapsulation and routing to optimize the freight. The problem is that mobile resources, such as containers, are not quite similar to data packets, because they are real and not dematerialized. Thus the handling and the storing of mobile resources, such as containers, will create imbalances in the logistics network, leading to starvation or overstocking of logistic network nodes. We propose in this paper a study addressing this problem leading to some solutions.