Research on logistic organization has been paid little attention to by academicians in the field of logistics. Therefore, the purposes of this article are composed of the followings;
· To propose a hypothesis of a conceptual model how development process of global business organization affects on that of global logistic organization in early stages.
· To propose a relational model between business and logistic organizations development and to make clear mutual relation theoretically.
· To define development process stages of Japanese logistic organizations based on questionaires to the industrial firms concerned.
As a result of research, we could verify validity of the proposed hypothesis and succeeded in making clear development stages of Japanese logistic organization.
There are many issues like industry characteristics study and improvement on questionaire items. But further and in-depth study for the issues will be done hereafter.

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We consider a freight network design problem which determines optimal routes and shipment size of multiple commodities between various origin-destination pairs in a network to minimize the sum of the transportation and inventory costs. We formulate this problem as a nonlinear programming problem and develop a composite algorithm of lower and upper bounding procedures using Lagrangean relaxation technique.
Our numerical experiments with up to 40 nodes for layered network problems and 50 nodes for general network problems show that our algorithm generates good solutions within reasonable computational time.

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The vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) can be stated as follows : Find a minimum distance route for a vehicle that services the delivery and backhaul (pick-up) customers without violating the vehicle capacity constraint. In contrast to its practical importance very limited papers have been presented for this problem. The objective of this study is to shed a theoretical light to this problem. First we derive an asymptotic formula for the VRPB assuming that all nodes (customers) are distributed on the Euclidean plane using a simple heuristic based on partition of the region. Then we analyze a probabilistic variation of the VRPB and derive a formula that gives the expected travel distance of daily vehicle routes.

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In the field of packaging and distribution, many computer aided automatic systems are already operating and effectively automating individual operations in various stages. Yet there seems to be no systems into a total strategic system.
This paper therefore describes a packaging design information system for distribution.
One of the most important factors in successful packaging design is the selection of a proper package strength capable of protecting product quality during transportation and storage. In deducing the necessary package strength, determination of degradation factors can greatly affect the accuracy of the estimation. With this in mind, we conducted various creep test and impact tests to measure the extents of degradation of fiberboards in the environment of distribution. From the measured values, the degradation factors for various distribution conditions are determined as basic data for automatic design by the computer.
Moreover, concerning the loading of packages, which has been difficult to deal with theoretically, the authors have investigated the ways for incorporating experienced operators' know-how of efficient operations and restrictive conditions to be expected. Then, an expert rule-base system is developed 'and a loading pattern can be deduced which as the maximum area efficiency under the applicable restrictions on loading.
In this report, we derived the degradation factor concerning the actual compressive strength through various experiments and structured a rule base using specialized deductions based on the intuition and long years of experience of our engineers. The results of this study show that it is now possible to develop a packaging design information system for distribulion combining the data base, production-rule-based systems for pallet loading pattern, compressive strength analysis and barcode system.

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Now, the global environment has been destructed by industrial activities. The logistics is responsible for the problem. In particular, truck exhaust gas has become a major cause of air pollution, global warming, and acid rain.
This paper describes the relation between the environment problem and logistics.
First, I study on the mode choise of shipper with the discriminate analysis, then I describe that the modal shift is very effective to conserve the environment.
Second, I calculate the quantities of modal shift from truck transportation to another with discriminate model, the effectiveness of modal shift with cost model of truck and costal ship.
As the results, we have to charge the tax incentives to truck transportation.

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