This publication is a substantive report on the author’s work, carried out as part of a research task on the location of logistics centers in Poland, undertaken at the initiative of the Ministry of Transport and financed by the State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN). The entire publication covers three issues (these will be three parts of the publication):
■ Part I – GRAPHICAL FUNCTIONAL-SPATIAL MODELS OF LOGISTICS CENTERS INTEGRATED INTO THE NATIONAL LOGISTICS SYSTEM
■ Part II – BASICS OF DIMENSIONING AND EVALUATING THE EFFICIENCY OF LOGISTICS CENTER DESIGN SOLUTIONS
■ Part III – EXAMPLES OF LOGISTICS CENTER DESIGN SOLUTIONS WITH CALCULATION PROCEDURES
These issues (especially those concerning Part I and Part II) were published in the book mentioned below (the author’s manual published by the Warsaw University of Technology Publishing House), as well as in the collection of non-session papers of the Polish Logistics Congress LOGISTICS 2000 and in the Materials of the IV Conference on Applied Logistics, October 2000 in Ustroń. However, these publications were aimed at a narrow group of readers.
This publication is intended for a wide range of readers of “Logistyka” – a magazine with a long logistics tradition, based on solid technological, organizational, and information infrastructure foundations, who will likely soon encounter the design, implementation, or use of new (in Polish conditions) facilities, which are logistics centers. The author’s task is to introduce these facilities to the readers.
Graphical functional-spatial models of logistics centers integrated into the national logistics system
Logistics center
A logistics center (LC) is an independent business entity providing logistics services (transport, transshipment, warehousing, distribution, and cargo picking, etc.), thereby performing supply and distribution functions in a specific area.
The LC has at its disposal:
■ a designated area and infrastructure (roads, yards, parking lots, engineering structures, and buildings),
■ technological equipment for handling and storage as well as management devices,
■ qualified personnel,
■ organization.
The set of LC elements forms a logistics system, the structure and size of which depend on the logistics task.
National Logistics System
The model of the national logistics system (NLS) presented in the work was shaped through identification (Fig. S-1):
■ basic sources and destinations of cargo in the form of functional blocks of the national economy, such as IMPORT (Ai), EXTRACTION – AGRICULTURE – FISHERIES (Bj), PRODUCTION AND SERVICES (PUk), DISTRIBUTION I – wholesale (Dm), DISTRIBUTION II – retail (Fp), COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION (Gr), EXPORT (En),
■ cargo flow streams (Q) between the blocks mentioned above,
■ information flow streams (L) between the blocks mentioned above.
In such an NLS model, any LC can be embedded (integrated). An example of integrating an LC supporting supply, production, and distribution in a specific area (Fig. S-2) into the national logistics system is shown in Fig. S-3.