The Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML is the first address in holistic logistics research and works in all fields of internal and external logistics. In line with the Fraunhofer idea, solutions to problems are developed for companies to use immediately, but preliminary research is also carried out over a period of two to five years, and in some cases even longer. 334 scientists and 250 PhD students and students currently work at the institute, which was founded in 1981, supported by colleagues in workshops, laboratories and service areas.

Teams put together according to project and customer requirements create cross-industry and customer-specific solutions in areas such as material flow technology, business process modeling and in the areas of traffic systems and resource logistics. Other current research priorities are in the field of artificial intelligence, smart finance and the "Internet of Things", which the institute coordinates Fraunhofer-wide. In addition, the Fraunhofer IML is working with the large-scale research project Silicon Economy on the implementation of a decentralized, federal and open platform economy in Germany and Europe. For interdisciplinary projects, the institute can fall back on a total of 29,000 employees in 75 facilities throughout the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The management of the Fraunhofer Transport Alliance,