Arne Heinold

Kuehne Logistics University is offering a PhD opportunity within UNITY, a new research project developed in collaboration with the Kuehne Climate Center. The project addresses a central challenge in sustainable logistics: how accurate are transport-emission estimates, and what are the consequences when decisions depend on inaccurate estimates? The doctoral researcher will help develop a unified, open-source model for estimating emissions across all major transport modes. The model will bring together parameter-driven methods from academic research with data-driven methods used in standards and frameworks, creating a common basis for analyzing transport emissions and supporting decarbonization decisions. The research combines transportation, environmental science, sustainable logistics, operations research, statistics, engineering, and computational modeling. Potential approaches may draw on vehicle, energy, and fuel-consumption models as well as established frameworks such as the GLEC Framework and ISO 14083. Programming, including Python-based model development, will be an important part of the work. The PhD student will join a collaborative, international research environment in Hamburg and contribute to research with practical relevance for transport systems and sustainable logistics, including applications in emerging economies. The project is supervised by Arne Heinold, Professor for Transportation at Kuehne Logistics University, in collaboration with the Kuehne Climate Center.