Overview
The growing economic impact of services in our society is leading to increased efforts to improve flexibility and adapt services to match individual customer needs. For example, customers awaiting goods want precise information on the time of delivery; i.e., the time range should be as short as possible. At the same time, a steadily increasing number of small-package deliveries and returns is projected due to the growth of e-commerce. However, improvements in prompt pick-up and delivery of goods have been hindered by demographic developments such as the increase of single-person households and the growing mobility of the society. These issues have prompted the search for more efficient ways of managing the transport of goods. The cluster project is part of the research initiative INVENT.
The project is pursuing a vision of improved transport efficiency in delivery of goods. The objective is to investigate how existing and emerging information and communication technologies can be used to manage the flux of transported goods more efficiently and thus to reduce traffic demand. The focus of the project is on local and regional traffic flows. Pick-up and delivery traffic, particularly in urban areas, the so-called 'last mile', offer a substantial potential for implementation of new concepts in logistics. Planning and management capabilities should be designed and optimized with a precision extending to the exact street address. To this end, recent developments and opportunities for utilization of public mobile communication networks and intelligent delivery route planning tools are to be investigated.
In classical static delivery route planning, the only aspect of the three key factors (customer, vehicle, and roadway network) taken into account is the set of transport orders. The vehicles execute their delivery route plan without the slightest feedback, and the only available attributes of the traffic network are heuristics based on experience and historical data. Any attempt to make this process dynamic constitutes an intervention in the optimization of this fixed logistic procedure. Achieving the desired flexibility can be succesful by dynamic processing, a challenge for planning, communication and vehicle systems.
In general, the project distinguishes two planning horizons: The first scenario – Scenario 2005 – takes existing technologies that could be available within a short time for a product solution into account. In contrast, the second scenario – Scenario 2010 – pursues more visionary ideas and incorporates technical options that are expected to be available within a few years. To this end, leading industrial partners have joined forces in an interdisciplinary investigation of current and emerging issues concerning the most sensible and efficient use of available resources.