Traffic Management and Transportation

The cooperation with Amazon is focused on the analysis and optimization of yard logistics and site design for select Amazon sortation centers of the middle mile in several sub-projects. Amazon and Fraunhofer IML have been working together since July of 2017. More than 20 sites and concepts have already been successfully investigated and/or effectively improved during this time.

The projects are motivated by the special logistical, transportation, and structural requirements for the specific sortation centers. Safely, effectively, and efficiently processing the high traffic volumes in a small space is the goal. Core project tasks are analyzing and optimizing the yard logistics and structural characteristics of the sites. The investigations focus on the site design, internal traffic, yard management processes, and interfaces to other process segments such as loading and unloading.

In order to quickly identify significant customer-oriented potential, the project team pursues a top-down approach with a successively increasing granularity of the examination. Quickly taking new information and customer requirements into account through iterations is possible as well. Traffic engineering methods such as microscopic traffic flow simulations for yard logistics support the analysis and optimization.