Vanderlande is the global market leader for value-added logistic process automation at airports and in the parcel market. The company is also a leading supplier of process automation solutions for warehouses. Some figures:

Vanderlande’s baggage handling systems move 3.7 billion pieces of luggage around the world per year.
Our systems are active in 600 airports including 13 of the world’s top 20.
More than 39 million parcels are sorted by its systems every day, which have been installed for the world’s leading parcel companies.
Many of the largest global e-commerce players and distribution firms have confidence in Vanderlande’s efficient and reliable solutions.

Vanderlande focuses on the optimization of its customers’ business processes and competitive positions. Through close cooperation, we strive for the improvement of our customers’ operational activities and the expansion of their logistical achievements.

For Vanderlande, it is critical that we have state-of-the-art techniques to analyze and optimize our customers’ logistics processes. Reasons are (a) the constant increasing size and complexity of our material handling solutions, (b) growing complexity of our software solutions, covering larger parts of our customers’ business processes, and © the demand for more advanced service offerings, covering logistics and business services. We believe that process mining is of high value for Vanderlande. Therefore, we work with the Eindhoven University of Technology on making process mining fit for analyzing logistics processes. In this context, we offer graduation projects on process mining and the application in our business.

Topic 1: 3D Visualisation of logistic processes

Within Vanderlande, we use a 3D library to create realistic simulation and emulation models. The topic of this graduation topic is to use this existing library within our process mining tooling; we want to visualize the logistic processes in 3D within our process mining tooling.

Deliverables:

Become acquainted with both our 3D library and our process mining tooling
Come up with a conceptual solution to combine both
Realize the solution in a proof-of-concept, where the existing 3D library is connected to our process mining tooling
Application of the proof-of-concept on at least one system to test and validate

Topic 2: Implementation of scalable process discovery and conformance checking algorithms

Our systems generate big amounts of data. This is often a limiting factor; existing process mining tooling cannot work with multiple days of systems data. Because of this, we perform our analyses on a relative limited time-period, which reduces the certainty of the outcome of our analyses. For this, we are looking for algorithms that allow for scalable process discovery and conformance checking. This is a topic that we would like to work on with a graduate student.

Deliverables of the graduation study:

Problem analysis
Conceptual solution of algorithms that allow for scalable process discovery and conformance checking
Realize the solution in a proof-of-concept
Apply the proof-of-concept on at least one system to test and validate