The management of transshipment terminals. Desicion support for terminal operations in finished vehicle supply chains. (Q2488573)

This book, as mentioned by the author in the acknowledgements, is inspired by a project to improve the efficiency of terminal operations at the port of Bremerhaven, Germany. The book gives a comprehensive coverage of the qualitative aspects and quantitative models in terminal operations. The Chapters are well created and are sufficient by themselves in covering the various aspects such as Automobile manufacturing, Intermodal vehicle transportation systems, Management of Terminal Operations, Modelling the operations, Storage space allocation, personnel deployment and IT integration. Expectedly, the first three chapters provide data to stress the importance and growth in the areas of Automobile manufacturing, Transshipment and Management of Terminal Operations. They also describe the various issues and decisions related to these topics. The next three chapters (5 to 7) describe quantitative models based on mathematical programming and heuristics to solve the various tactical and operational issues. The eighth chapter provides useful insights on integrating the various aspects through IT enabled systems. The author does not explicitly mention the intended users of this book. I believe that this would be useful to researchers in this area. The book can also be a course text for a specific advanced course but with limited scope. The first half can be a reference book for a qualitative course on terminal operations, providing material on various current issues in the subject. While going through the book, I felt that the author was very comfortable in the presentation of quantitative models. Having said that, I should add that the qualitative part has also been addressed well by the author. There were times I felt that the reader will find either the qualitative part or the quantitative part useful in one reading. Very few will find immediate use for all the aspects touched upon in the book. The modeling portion of the book seems to abruptly describe the models developed by the author and the research group. I would have liked to see a general modeling framework, which could classify the problems based on assumptions, solution methodologies etc before getting into specific solution methods such as mathematical programming, tabu search etc. The author could have added some material on the future of the industry and additional research issues due to increased scale and scope of operations Overall, I would conclude that the book has addressed an important dimension of the automobile business, namely the distribution. It is very relevant and useful in understanding the issues in transportation and distribution in the context of globalization. This book would add to the wealth of knowledge in the emerging field of Logistics and Supply Chain Management and benefit both academia and industry in understanding and modeling the various issues related to Transshipment terminals.