Introducing an Intelligent Goods Service Framework

Abstract

With the increasing diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the transportation of goods sector is in a position to adopt novel intelligent services that cut across the otherwise highly fragmented and heterogeneous market, which today consists of a myriad of actors. Legacy systems that rely upon direct integration between all actors involved in the transportation ecosystem face considerable challenges for information sharing. Meanwhile, IoT based services, which are designed as devices that follow goods and communicate directly to cloud-based backend systems, may provide services that previously were not available. For the purposes of this paper, we present a theoretical framework for classification of such intelligent goods systems based on a literature study. The framework, labelled as the Intelligent Goods Service (IGS) framework, aims at increasing the understanding of the actors, agents, and services involved in an intelligent goods system, and to facilitate system comparisons and the development of new innovative solutions. As an illustration of how the IGS framework can be used and contribute to research in this area, we provide an example from a direct industry–academia collaboration.

Designing a shared freight service intelligence platform for transport stakeholders using mobile telematics

“…This concept provides a valuable approach to investigating our research topic since telematics-enabled FTAs constitute IoT devices with capabilities to convert transport assets into smart connected FTAs that follow the paradigm of a smart service platform (Porter and Heppelmann 2014;Beverungen et al 2020) to enable smart services along with the end-to-end freight lifecycle processes (Issaoui et al 2020;Heinbach et al 2022a). Therefore, we combine the theoretical concepts of virtual food supply chains (Verdouw et al 2016) and intelligent good services (Jevinger and Olsson 2021) and establish an adopted architecture for a novel FSIP as the research ground for the study presented in this paper. To this extent, we follow the definition of intelligent goods proposed by Jevinger et al (2014) who characterize the intelligence of goods as different capability dimensions delivering support to different degrees.…”

“…That is, for instance, the memory storage capability dimension of goods that facilitate the storage of an identity, additional types of data, or algorithms/decision rules. Herein, Jevinger and Olsson (2021) Fig. 4 Stakeholder-oriented freight service intelligence architecture adopted from Verdouw et al (2016) emphasize that intelligence requires more than being able to communicate the identity of tagged goods allowing intermodal transport assets equipped with an ICT to function as an enabler to realize freight service intelligence.…”

“…Physical FTAs, therefore, exchange data with virtual objects in the next layer that are constantly updated (Verdouw et al 2016). The cloud-based middleware acts as a data hub and the exchanged data can be further enriched through the data integration/processing of other IS (e.g., weather information systems, cloud-based freight exchanges, TMS) by the existing freight service intelligence capabilities derived from intelligent good services (Jevinger and Olsson 2021). Subsequently, service provisions are determined in the next layer and "(…) differ from basic virtualizations that only show the whereabouts of physical objects to smart virtual objects that proactively take actions" (Verdouw et al 2016).…”

“…To be more precise, loading units (e.g., cargo or products on pallets) require physical and standardized freight transport assets (FTAs) (e.g., ISO containers, swap bodies, intermodal trailers) over the road, rail, and sea transport mode to facilitate freight services. Herein, freight service intelligence is positioned within the concept of smart cargo (McFarlane et al 2003), autonomous freight transportation (Sternberg and Andersson 2014), and intelligent goods services (Jevinger and Olsson 2021) at the edge of an integrated platform for shared information from freight operations among transport stakeholders. Thus, for the purpose of this paper, we understand freight service intelligence as the capabilities of mobile telematics applied as an IoT enabler to FTAs based on the concept of smart connected products (Porter and Heppelmann 2014).…”