Opportunities and Challenges of Scheduling in Logistics Industrial Park Cyber-Physical Systems

Scheduling plays a fundamental role in logistics industry through generating decisions concerning optimal resource allocation and utilization. Nowadays, the advances of modern sensoring, communications and computing techniques have been widely adopted to construct the infrastructure for data acquisition, transmission and processing in logistics scenarios, which facilitates the decision making and enables the efficient and effective scheduling in various fashions. Based on these advantages, logistics industrial park cyber-physical systems are formed that benefit logistics operations through substantially improving the efficiency and reducing the economic cost. However, this also poses challenges to the scheduling in logistics industrial parks due to the high complexity, which can further induce unexpected system updates that request frequent decision making within limited time. This paper investigates both the opportunities and challenges through platform-based vehicle scheduling. Two individual models are developed for the day-ahead and real-time scheduling scenarios, respectively, which can successfully accommodate multiple difficulties in real-world applications.