Towards Closed-loop Maintenance Logistics for Offshore Wind Farms: Approaches for Strategic and Tactical Decision-making

Europe’s offshore wind capacity is expected to reach 450 GW by 2050, meeting 30% of Europe’s electricity demand. With the increase of installed capacity, the costs invested in O&M will also increase significantly considering O&M cost is one of the biggest contributors to life cycle costs. The improvement of O&M management for...

Flexible, Dynamic, and Collaborative Synchromodal Transport Planning Considering Preferences

Freight transport faces a threefold challenge of limited resources, increasing demand for efficient goods movement, and the pressing need to meet ambitious emissions reduction targets in ever shorter timelines. To address these challenges, the industry requires urgent innovation and the adoption of new technologies and logistics systems to...

Cooperative Control of Autonomous Multi-Vessel Systems for Floating Object Manipulation

This thesis provides a set of cooperative control schemes for autonomous multi-vessel systems to manipulate a floating object through physical interconnections in onshore (inland waterways and ports) and offshore areas. Thanks to the maturity and popularity of the advancing technologies in information, communication, sensors, automatic control,...

Real-time Co-planning in Synchromodal Transport Networks using Model Predictive Control

Container transport is an essential part of the well-functioning, highly specialized, and global production chains society currently relies on. To improve the utilization of resources, it is important to ensure all processes are as efficient as possible. Synchromodal transport is a recent transport paradigm which seeks to increase the efficiency...

Solving Large-Scale Dynamic Collaborative Vehicle Routing Problems: An Auction-Based Multi-Agent Approach

The freight transportation sector is one of the major contributors to air pollution. An important way to reduce emissions consists of collective route planning. Although unloaded trips and inefficient routes could not always be prevented by individual carriers, more efficient operations could often be obtained if multiple carriers collaborate by...

Dynamic Fleet Management for Autonomous Vehicles: Learning- and optimization-based strategies

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been heralded as the key to unlock a shared mobility future where transportation is more efficient, convenient, and cheaper. However, the AV utopia can only come to fruition if the majority of users trust that autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems are on a par with owning a vehicle in terms of service...

Dynamic, Stochastic, and Coordinated Optimization for Synchromodal Matching Platforms

With the increasing volumes of containers in global trade, efficient global container transport planning becomes more and more important. To improve the competitiveness in global supply chains, stakeholders turn to collaborate with each other at vertical as well as horizontal level, namely synchromodal transportation. Synchromodality is the...

Smart offshore heavy lift operations

Autonomous vessels have developed into a popular research area in both industry and academia. The application of autonomy in offshore and coastal engineering could offer a safe and efficient solution to offshore transportation and operation. However, the state of the art in research has focused on waterborne transportation. Very limited research...

Control for autonomous all-electric ships: Integrating maneuvering, energy management, and power generation control

In the last few years, autonomous shipping has been under extensive consideration by academic and industrial communities as well as governmental organizations due to several potential advantages that it introduces. Furthermore, due to the drastic environmental consequences of transport overwater, international organizations have enforced the...

Cooperative Multi-Vessel Systems for Waterborne Transport

This PhD thesis investigates V2V, V2I, and I2I cooperation of CMVSs for improving the safety and efficiency of waterborne transport. A predictive motion control framework and a generic negotiation framework are proposed to achieve consensus among controllers. Different applications provide insights into the impact of CMVSs on the performance of...

Controlled perishable goods logistics: Real-time coordination for fresher products

This thesis provides tools for decision support systems for perishable goods logistics. It also provides an approach for enterprises to estimate the benefit of adopting the proposed logistic systems. Perishable products are produced, transported, and consumed all over the world. Thanks to perishable goods supply chains, we can enjoy safe, fresh,...

Autonomous control for adaptive ships: with hybrid propulsion and power generation

Shipping plays a crucial role in modern society, but has to reduce its impact on the environment. The commercial availability of power electronic converters and lithium-ion batteries provides an opportunity to improve performance of ships energy systems while reducing their environmental impact. However, the degrees of freedom in control for...

Control and Coordination for Automated Container Terminals

For enhancing the performance of automated container terminals, this PhD thesis focuses on improving energy efficiency and implementing more autonomous equipment (e.g., free-ranging AGVs) at the operational level. On the one hand, due to the increased energy price and environmental stress, energy efficiency needs to be improved. On the other...