Abstract
The practical relevance and challenging nature of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) have motivated the Operations Research community to consider different practical requirements and problem variants throughout the years. However, businesses still face increasingly specific and complex transportation requirements that need to be tackled, one of them being synchronisation. No literature contextualises synchronisation among other types of problem aspects of the VRP, increasing ambiguity in the nomenclature used by the community. The contributions of this paper originate from a literature review and are threefold. First, new conceptual and classification schemas are proposed to analyse literature and re-organise different interdependencies that arise in routing decisions. Secondly, a modelling framework is presented based on the proposed schemas. Finally, an extensive literature review identifies future research gaps and opportunities in the field of VRPs with synchronisation. © 2023 The Author(s)

Abstract
The potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies in the realm of Industry 4.0 to generate valuable data for monitoring the performance of the production processes and the whole supply chain is well established. However, these large volumes of data can be used within planning and control systems (PCSs) to enhance real-time planning and decision-making. This paper conducts a literature review to envisage an overall system architecture that combines IoT and PCS for planning, monitoring and control of operations at the level of an industrial production process or at the level of its supply chain. Despite the extensive literature on IoT implementations, few studies explain the interactions between IoT and the components of PCS. It is expected that, with the increasing digitization of business processes, approaches with PCS and IoT become ubiquitous in the near future. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
This paper addresses the integration of the planning decisions concerning inbound logistics in an industrial setting (from the suppliers to the mill) and outbound logistics (from the mill to customers). The goal is to find the minimum cost routing plan, which includes the cost-effective outbound and inbound daily routes (OIRs), consisting of a sequence of deliveries of customer orders, pickup of a full truck-load at a supplier, and its delivery to the mill. This study distinguishes between three planning strategies: opportunistic backhauling planning (OBP), integrated inbound and outbound planning (IIOP) and decoupled planning (DIOP), the latter being the commonly used, particularly in the case of the wood-based panel industry under study. From the point of view of process integration, OBP can be considered as an intermediate stage from DIOP to IIOP. The problem is modelled as a Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls, enriched with case-specific rules for visiting the backhaul, split deliveries to customers and the use of a heterogeneous fleet. A new fix-and-optimise matheuristic is proposed for this problem, seeking to obtain good quality solutions within a reasonable computational time. The results from its application to the wood-based panel industry in Portugal show that IIOP can help to reduce total costs in about 2.7%, when compared with DIOP, due to better use of the delivery truck and a reduction of the number of dedicated inbound routes. Regarding OBP, fostering the use of OIRs does not necessarily lead to better routing plans than DIOP, as it depends upon a favourable geographical configuration of the set of customers to be visited in a day, specifically, the relative distance between a linehaul that can be visited last in a route, a neighboring backhaul, and a mill. The paper further provides valuable managerial insights on how the routing plan is impacted by the values of business-related model parameters which are set by the planner with some degree of uncertainty. Results suggest that increasing the maximum length of the route will likely have the largest impact in reducing transportation costs. Moreover, increasing the value of a reward paid for visiting a backhaul can foster the percentage of OIR in the optimal routing plan.

Abstract
The search for higher efficiency in transportation planning processes in real life applications is challenging. The synchronisation of different vehicles performing interrelated operations can enforce a better use of vehicle fleets and decrease travelled distances and non-productive times, leading to a reduction of logistics costs. In this work, the full truck-load pickup and delivery problem with multiple vehicle synchronisation (FT-PDP-mVS) is presented. This problem is motivated by a real-life application in the biomass supply chain "hot-system", where it is necessary to simultaneously perform chipping and transportation operations at the forest roadside. The FT-PDP-mVS consists in determining the integrated routes for three distinct types of vehicles, which need to perform interrelated operations with minimum logistics costs. We extend existing studies in synchronisation of multiple routes by acknowledging several synchronisation aspects, such as operations and movement synchronisation. A novel mixed integer programming model (MIP) is presented, along with valid inequalities to tighten the formulation. A solution method approach is developed based on the fix-and-optimise principles under a variable neighbourhood decomposition search. Results of its application to 19 instances based on a real-world case-study demonstrate its performance. For a baseline instance, the synchronisation aspects tackled in this problem allowed for significant gains when compared to the company's current planning approach. Furthermore, the proposed approach can enhance planning and decision making processes by providing valuable insights about the impact of key parameters of biomass logistics over the routing results.

Abstract
The growing economic importance of the biomass-for-bioenergy in Europe motivates research on biomass supply chain design and planning. The temporally and geographically fragmented availability of woody biomass makes it particularly relevant to find cost-effective solutions for biomass production, storage and transportation up to the consumption facility. This paper addresses tactical decisions related with optimal allocation of wood chips from forest residues at forest sites to terminals and power plants. The emphasis is on a "hot-system" with synchronized chipping and chips transportation at the roadside. Thus, decisions related with the assignment of chippers to forest sites are also considered. We extend existing studies by considering the impact of the wood chips energy content variation in the logistics planning. This is a key issue in biomass-for-bioenergy supply chains. The higher the moisture content of wood chips, the lower its net caloric value and therefore, a larger amount of chips is needed to meet the contracted demand. We propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model to solve this problem to optimality. Results of applying the model in a biomass supply chain case in Finland are presented. Results suggest that a 20% improvement in the supplier profit can be obtained with the proposed approach when compared with a baseline situation that relies on empirical estimates for a fixed and known moisture content in the end of an obliged storage age.