Posts tagged logistics

How do you build a complex logistic system that collects, at national scale, the country-wide harvest, on a developing country, with little or no good data and uneven roads conditions?

To know the harvest needs, we need to know the harvest volume, timing and road access. To know these, we need good road maps (we will use OSM), and a custom routing engine (OSRM, that runs on top of OSM) to guide our loaded trucks (“DCM”s, a type of truck). That means we will need JOSM to improve OSM, and also QGIS to visualize the harvest and support the decision making. To assist on the mapping we use the free-tier of the commercial service MAPBOX (that pulls OSM data), as well as Digital Globe (DG) satellite images, and processed data from our corporate management tool (RMT) — which has information such a farmer locations, GPS traces and tree phenology data — . Then, to prioritize the tracing, to make statistics of the logistics and to estimate the harvest, we will need to do some data science. We will be using PYTHON, running on JUPYTER notebooks for documentation and clarity. To register and managed the knowledge we create, and to collaborate among the member of the team, we will use GIT and we will back it up on GITHUB, where we also do file progress and Issues.

via https://medium.com/@brunosan/building-an-open-source-national-scale-logistic-system-e45b597605f2

Welcome to DP World London Gateway, the latest international trophy of the oil-rich emirate of Dubai, and one of the biggest privately funded infrastructure projects the UK has ever seen. It is a gargantuan undertaking (on the scale of Crossrail, Terminal 5 or HS2) that’s projected to have a bigger economic impact than the Olympics – but you might not even know it was happening. The port has been up and running for almost two years, with two of its six berths now complete and a third well on the way. But, unlike the daily controversy of runways and commuter trains, the cumbersome business of how 90% of our goods reach us from all over the world doesn’t tend to impinge on the public psyche. Satnav certainly hasn’t caught up. As we drive out to the sprawling sandy landscape, the blue dot floats out into the Thames, from whose depths this new quayside has been summoned. Over 30 million tonnes of silt was dredged to make this artificial land mass, which extends 400m beyond the original shoreline, a process that saw the largest migration of animals in Europe – with 320,000 newts, water voles and adders relocated to a new nature reserve nearby. The sheer scale is impossible to comprehend from the ground: the facility is twice the size of the City of London.

via https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/15/london-gateway-megaport-you-didnt-know-existed-docks#img–3

In 2007, I moved into an apartment building in St. Paul that was built during the early 1920s. I remember asking the building manager what the small, two-foot tall doors attached to the outside of each apartment were for. The doors had long been painted shut and no longer opened to the inside of the apartments, as it looked like they should. The manager explained that the doors were used decades ago by milkmen who would make deliveries during the day while people were at work.

In the 1920s virtually all milk consumed in the United States was delivered directly to the home. By the early 1970s, it was only about 15%. By the 1990s, it was less than 1%. Whither the man of milk?

http://bit.ly/I59OfE