BioLogistics and the Struggle for Efficiency: Concepts and Perspectives

Abstract

The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led to technical solutions that are vulnerable to variations in supply and demand, and to perturbations. In contrast, nature already provides a large variety of efficient, flexible and robust logistic solutions. Can we utilize biological principles to design systems, which can flexibly adapt to hardly predictable, fluctuating conditions? We propose a bio-inspired "BioLogistics" approach to deduce dynamic organization processes and principles of adaptive self-control from biological systems, and to transfer them to man-made logistics (including nanologistics), using principles of modularity, self-assembly, self-organization, and decentralized coordination. Conversely, logistic models can help revealing the logic of biological processes at the systems level.

Supplementary videos are available at http://www.soms.ethz.ch/research/biologistics

References in corpus (2)

• Traffic and Related Self-Driven Many-Particle Systems
• Self-Control of Traffic Lights and Vehicle Flows in Urban Road Networks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
• Living in Living Cities
• Edge anisotropy and the geometric perspective on flow networks
• A perturbative approach to Lagrangian flow networks
• Network heterogeneity and node capacity lead to heterogeneous scaling of fluctuations in random walks on graphs
• Finance 4.0: Design principles for a value-sensitive cryptoecnomic system to address sustainability
• Fundamental and Real-World Challenges in Economics