The "Future Congress Logistics - 39th Dortmund Talks", jointly organized by the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML and the Digital Hub Logistics, took place for the second time as a purely digital event and free of charge for all participants due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Prof. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director of Fraunhofer IML (pictured), explained in his opening speech on the first day of the congress, September 14, how the potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G and blockchain can be leveraged with the help of open source and open innovation. "The clear commitment of leading logistics companies to open source marks a paradigm shift in logistics. Only in this way will it be possible to exploit the opportunities of digitalization and jointly shape the ecosystem of a future Silicon Economy - and provide a European response to the rapid developments in the USA and China," says ten Hompel.

This was followed by a welcome address by Andreas Scheuer, Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, a keynote speech by Dr Reinhold Achatz, formerly of thyssenkrupp, on the topic of "Data rooms - a new paradigm for sovereign data exchange" and a panel discussion on the topic of "Digitalization - mastering common challenges together" with Prof. Michael ten Hompel, Dr Reinhold Achatz, Dr Stephan Peters, member of the Executive Board at Rhenus, and Gordon Riske, Chairman of the Executive Board at KION GROUP. Other key topics of the ZukunftsPlenum on the first day of the congress, September 14, were sustainability in logistics and blockchain.

The topic-specific sequences of the Fraunhofer Symposium on the second and third days of the congress, September 15 and 16, will focus on topics such as AGV-based order picking, gamification, blockchain start-ups, artificial intelligence (AI) in logistics, multimodal transport chains and sustainable logistics locations. The Digital Sandbox will also be presenting the latest innovations from Fraunhofer IML on all three days of the congress.

The winners of the Digital Logistics Awards 2021, one of the most important awards in the logistics start-up scene, were also announced on the first day of the congress: the start-ups Manyfolds, logistics.cloud and AllRead MLT made it to the top three places in the competition for the most innovative digital solutions for logistics and received prize money totaling 22,000 euros. For the first time, there was also a special award in the "Smart Logistics in Africa" category. The winner in this category was the company Chekkit Technologies from Nigeria.