Author(s)

A. Tsertou, A. Amditis, T. Theodoropoulos, E. Latsa, J. Kanellopoulos, M. Kotras

Abstract

Since the container became the driver of change in worldwide freight transport, the optimal utilization of container capacities has become a key challenge of the supply chain management. Often, fragments of customer orders arrive at their destination via different, sub-optimal routes which impose increased delivery times, costs and CO₂ emissions to the global supply chain. A barrier to efficient container consolidation at port terminals is the reduced visibility and limited information exchange between stakeholders on real-time location and status of a container and its contents. This is due to a multitude of reasons: the lack of a common standard for information exchange, competition matters, absence of trusted service providers collecting data, information shared on a next carrier basis without disseminating information to the rest of the stakeholders. In addition, multimodal transport involves many carriers until the goods reach their final destination. Well-defined trigger points regarding cargo will allow for better monitoring of shipments and the introduction of KPIs for route evaluation and carrier performance. This work proposes a cloud-based information portal as an ICT enabling technology used by supply chain stakeholders; the latter will use this portal to feed it with real-time information from existing platforms so that a better visibility for all parties is enabled. This portal will permit better visibility for end-customers, promote standardization of logistics processes, offer an increased profitability for cloud services providers, improve their activities expansion and accelerate customs related process handling.

Keywords

container consolidation, dynamic, synchromodality, cloud computing, portal, PaaS