Benoit Montreuil is one of those proponents, and he will discuss the Physical Internet and how it could transform the way goods are moved, stored, supplied and used at 1 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Chao Auditorium in the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library.
Montreuil is the Coca-Cola Material Handling and Distribution Chair in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is leading Georgia Tech’s initiatives to develop the knowledge required to design and operate the globally emerging Physical Internet.
Montreuil’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by UofL’s Logistics and Distribution Institute as part of its LoDI Seminar Series. The goal of the series is to bring the brightest minds and the best ideas in logistics and distribution to campus to educate and inspire the UofL community.
“The Physical Internet really is the biggest idea to come to logistics since the shipping container, and many would argue that the shipping container gave us the global economy,” said LoDI director Kevin Gue. “The Physical Internet posits a global logistics system based on standardized and modular containers that would move through the physical world in much the same way that packets of information move through the digital Internet.
“The potential benefit to society is enormous – from reducing truck traffic, to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to improving the lives of truck drivers by allowing them to spend less time away from home.”