Enterprise Collaboration Network for Transport and Logistics Services

Abstract

The development of the Single Window concept (unique access/contact point for composite services) for the multimodal door-to-door freight transport management is a complex endeavour that is being addressed by the European MIELE project. Led by port authorities, the project identified the need for a novel strategy to foster collaboration among stakeholders with a diversity of processes and technology. The multimodal perspective requires a convergence and thus collaboration of maritime, railway, road, and air transport facilities as it is the case for the need of traffic information for a real-time (re)planning if some accident is hindering the current route. This requires that traffic information from different operators is integrated into the freight transport routing planner. Furthermore, a unified coordination and operations management of the existing business processes is lacking. To integrate such contexts, an open enterprise collaboration network (ECoNet) infrastructure is presented and discussed.

The Need of Performance Indicators for Collaborative Business Ecosystems

“…Such context is defined as a set of services under a coordinated choreography on contributing for some valuable objective, allowing interoperability between people or systems that can work together for some business goals [8]. These generic collaboration spaces support virtual organizations and virtual organizations breeding environments, being particularly promising for SME networks [9]. Complementarily, the developments on Internet of Things, facilitating access to a large number of information sources, enable the materialization of the concept of sensing enterprise and the effective implementation of better performance measurement mechanisms.…”

Towards a Business Model Framework to Increase Collaboration in the Freight Industry

“…Collaboration-based business models not only facilitate reduced costs and improved customer service through shared information/assets and better coordination of collaborative network activities [7], but they also generate synergistic benefits that companies cannot achieve individually. It is important to recognize that the motivation for all parties in the collaborative relationship is to work together to become a "committee of equals" and to find greater value in the collaboration, ensuring its long-term success [15], and supporting coordination to deliver common business objectives [16]. Collaboration is possible when at least two actors share their efforts, data and/or assets to reach a common objective [17].…”

“…Cases studies of freight industry collaboration in the United Kingdom. Source: Aggregated data from [1] with concepts from[14][15][16][17]. Cont.…”

An Adaptive IoT Management Infrastructure for EcoTransport Networks

“…In the latter case, a significant work has been developed in the field of collaborative networks standing out works leading to the structure of organizational networks where is required that the companies progress towards a framework of preparation to cooperation through the implementation of what is known as a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) [8] in supporting the establishment of virtual organizations (VO) [9]. Thus, it was proposed a collaborative platform ECoNet aiming to structure the collaboration between organizations in the transports and logistics domains where the members of this network can share and exchange information using a common middleware infrastructure [10].…”

“…This information will be relevant for logistics operators or logistics parks because they allow accurately track cargo passage sites, without using GPS or GSM network. This potential collaboration involving highway concessionaires (as another collaborative stakeholder) has motivated the promotion of synergies with the ECoNet platform [10]. Nevertheless, the focus of the project is to develop the power generation system ("Energy Harvesting") which will load the "battery" extending the unit life.…”