This paper presents recent challenges and progress in real-world logistics. This research is carried out through inter-university collaboration and an industry-university partnership, which involves two universities (Waseda University and Khon Kaen University) and over 20 companies in manufacturing, logistics, trading and retailing industries. We address unmet needs in practice, and suggest possible new directions for logistics research.

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The phenomenon of aging populations, brought about when the number of people of productive age declines and the ratio of older workers in a productive population increases, is already starting to have an enormous impact on the progress of industrial economies. Given this, raising the ability of aging workers would be a way to render mute any judgments based on calendar age. Essential to this, however, is a yardstick by which to measure functional age, the cornerstone to designing a society of productive, aged workers, or specifically, a barometer for the development of dynamic aging workers. Looking closer, at the foundation of developing energetic, aged workers is the prevention of lifestyle diseases, and the key to this is having habits of daily exercise. This development of an energetic aging workforce is a way to control future “absenteeism” and “presenteeism.” This is the basic strategy of a society with an aging workforce. Upon achieving an active, aged workforce, the next goal will be to have aging workers who are highly adaptable to work, or more specifically, the building of a society of labor in Japan that can turn out many more productive, aged workers. The basic way to achieve this is to objectively assess workers' individual degree of health, lifestyle functions, and furthermore, the ability to adapt to work, as well as to properly match work ability with the job. These are the concepts upon which this report is based. This report expands upon a strategy of Ergonomics and Management in Occupational Health as a way to support a society of aged workers, interweaving business management concepts in ergonomics, and in light of occupational safety, health and employment measures, offers a view to comprehensive measures to be taken.

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The analysis of binary (0 or 1) data requires an analysis method whose objects are realizations. Yamashita and Suzuki (to appear) proposed principal points for binary distributions based on the concept of principal points, defined by Flury (1990). Ideally, when we search for the binary principal points, all combinations of the k-principal points should be considered; however, this problem cannot be solved in a straightforward manner because the number of combinations increases exponentially when the number of the variables increases. In this paper, we propose three heuristic methods for approximating principal points for binary distributions. The results indicate that our method enables us to find approximated principal points and summarize a binary distribution using the points.

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