Open Door Logistics specialises in the application of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence techniques to problems in geographic and transport logistics. These techniques include data mining, forecasting, machine learning, planning, optimisation, scheduling and vehicle routing.

Open Door Logistics was founded in 2014 by Dr Philip Welch. Although originally from a physics background, Phil has been working in software for logistics since 2005. During this time he has developed proprietary commercial solutions for a number of territory planning and vehicle routing problems, working closely with clients to capture their requirements and operational processes and translate these into solid working software.

 View Philip Welch’s profile

Phil has worked both within the commercial and research sectors of transport logistics. As part of the EU ADVANCE research project he developed techniques to predict end-of-day freight demand in a large freight network. The model used big data techniques - data mining and machine learning - to analyse multiple diverse information sources and continually refine its prediction. An overview is available in these proceedings.

Phil specialises in the application of modern artificial intelligence techniques - particularly computational intelligence - to problems in transport logistics, with particular emphasis on:

• Big data techniques - data mining and machine learning, based on the Weka data mining system.
• Operations research problems
  • Arc routing
  • Periodic scheduling
  • Territory optimisation
  • Vehicle routing
• Optimisation techniques
  • Evolutionary algorithms - e.g. genetic algorithms, simulated annealing etc.
  • Local search methods
• Prediction models - e.g. time series prediction

He has presented at various conferences on these subjects:

• A proposed meta-model for combinatorial optimisation problems within transport logistics. MIC 2011: 9th Metaheuristics International Conference, Udine, Italy, 2011.
• Application of model-based prediction to support operational decisions in logistics networks. 3rd workshop on Artificial Intelligence and logistics (AILog-2012), 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), Montpellier, France, 2012.
• Towards a General Meta-Heuristic Optimiser for Vehicle Routing: Experiments on Six VRP Types. EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization (VeRoLog), Southampton, UK, 2013. Presentation is available here.