Dear Readers!
In response to your expectations, we are continuing our initiative – the free presentation of selected papers from the Logistics congresses organized by the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing, specifically for you. Now it is the turn of the 2004 Congress, the main theme of which was Logistics networks in an integrated European market.
You will be introduced to the Congress theme by the preface to the book edition of the conference materials, prepared by Stanisław Krzyżaniak, PhD, Eng.
We present to you a collection of papers submitted to the Polish Logistics Congress LOGISTICS 2004. Conferences in this series, organized since 1992 on a biennial basis, gather several hundred participants each time and are undoubtedly the most important events in the logistics conference market, not only in Poland but also in Central and Eastern Europe. As in the breakthrough year 2000, the organizers decided to give the conference held in 2004 the rank of a congress. This time, to emphasize the special circumstances accompanying this event – the enlargement of the European Union, which also included Poland.
The Polish Logistics Congress LOGISTICS 2004 stood out in another way from previous conferences in this series. It was carried out as one of the tasks of the Polish Competence Center in Logistics. The Center was established within the structures of the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing as the POLLOCO project, financed by the European Union’s 5th Framework Programme. Its main goal is to promote and support the development of intermodal transport solutions based on a network of public logistics centers in Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries. It was this topic that became the “seed” of the Congress program, as well as the content of two thematic sessions. And the main theme of the entire Congress was “Logistics networks in an integrated European market”. So, two phenomena: political-economic, i.e., the progressing European integration finding its latest expression in the accession of 10 new members of the European Union, and logistical, covering the entire spectrum of elements: organizational concepts, infrastructure, or solutions in the area of ICT, serving faster, reliable, and cost-effective movement of goods in a growing market. It seems that it is logistics networks that will allow meeting new challenges. You will read about their development, elements, and features distinguishing them from earlier solutions in the paper by Grzegorz Szyszka “Logistics networks – a new dimension of logistics”. […]
Creating logistics networks, and especially their operation, gives rise to a number of problems of a very different nature. These are: transport and transshipment infrastructure (especially focused on multimodal solutions), information solutions (including information exchange standards), and their IT and telecommunications support, increasingly provided in the form of various applications (“e-solutions”), increasingly current, unfortunately, security issues, and finally – often key – problems of cooperation and trust between partners. All these issues found their place in the conference program, in the topics of individual thematic sessions. […]
Both the presentations and the papers included here present various aspects of the discussed issues. They also differ in the level of detail. Alongside review papers presenting general trends and concepts, we will find examples of specific solutions, ready for implementation or even already being implemented. We consider this diversity of approach and method of presentation to be a strength – both of the Congress sessions and of this collection of papers. […]
Stanisław Krzyżaniak, PhD, Eng.