Transport and logistics today have evolved into a high-technology industry. Distribution is no longer about moving cargo over road or via air from A to B, but is a complex process based on intelligent systems for sorting, planning, routing, and consolidation that supports faster transportation, different transportation modes, fallback scenarios in case of failures, value added services such as time sensitive deliveries and tracing of products throughout the supply chain or transport network. Many larger companies have developed solutions for delivering these services in order to meet the requirements of their customers and to offer them methods for tracing their consignments. As smaller companies cannot afford these investments, they are mainly active in the "old" point-to-point transportation market. Continuous information about the current position or status of transport goods (in the sense that the exact geographic position can be queried at any time) at a piece level is not commonly available today. Typically, this information is provided - if at all - at a vehicle or container level only. Existing tracking solutions are typically based on scanning bar codes at process or control points. In daily business, products are frequently shipped by subcontractors of the transport company. If the subcontractor does not provide a point-to-point service, tracing is no longer possible. Only in a few cases do carriers exchange tracing information, but in most cases the costs for adapting the proprietary systems to each other are prohibitive. In order to support all kinds of logistic companies the main objective of the ParcelCall project is to develop and verify an inter-modal, real-time, end-to-end, tracking and tracing (T&T) system for transport and logistics applications - operating across all borders of carriers and transportation modes. The key idea is to provide common open (and ideally standardised) interfaces among all system components on top of standardised communication protocols, e.g., TCP/IP, GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth. Low costs, easy installation and adaptation of the legacy systems operated by the carriers to the new information infrastructure were key design criteria.
Samenvatting