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TRansport Optimiser & Planner

Objetivo

The project target is to develop an Internet-based service aimed at supporting collaboration among small companies of carriers. The idea is that many carriers (the Virtual Fleet) con share some resources (trucks) in order to optimise their work. The Internet service will support the Virtual Fleet by means of an adaptation of the VE (Virtual Enterprise) paradigm integrated with the monitoring functionality of GPS technology. The service consists of an optimised plan for Virtual Fleet trucks missions. The carrier asks for this service in order to reduce time wastes and costs. They can asks for goods delivery or declare their free resources to the Virtual Fleet. A WWW site collects the requests/declaration and computes the optimal plan. This implies a truck traffic reduction and improves Virtual Fleet performances.

Objectives:
The project target is to test an Internet-based service aimed at supporting the collaboration among small companies of carriers. This service mainly concerns the optimisation of the information chain and transport organisation to complete the truck load. The collaboration is born as a virtual network of small-medium sized carriers. Each of them keeps its own independence with respect to the others but decides to belong to a pool of carriers that tries to optimise its way of working. This optimisation acts on resources that are made available to the service by the carriers themselves; knowing who gives the resource and who asks for certain work, the optimising tools propose to the network the best solution. Once the carriers agree on the proposals, a GPS system will monitor the fleet behaviour. The idea is that the optimising service has to be considered as a support tool.

Work description:
The TROP services mainly come from optimising tools and monitoring devices. The first set of tools comes from EP20273 - PLENT project that studied and developed a Virtual Enterprise application. The VE paradigm will be adapted to the pool of carriers' (say Virtual Fleet) needs. Thus the PLENT Workflow Manager and Planner SW modules will be integrated in the TROP set of tools, customising their functionality according to Virtual Fleet needs. Those modules allow the management of a discrete set of resources (i.e. of trucks), proposing working plans and managing the communications among carriers. The monitoring activities will be performed by means of a GPS on-board navigation system (to be installed on the trucks to be monitored) and of some SW modules able to compute the right road to follow and to monitor the truck's position. All this functionality will be accessed by the carriers through the Virtual Fleet WWW site in the following the main project steps:
1. Business Requirement and Application Specifications: the two technology providers (SATA and Divitech) take into account the needs analysis carried out by LAPAM (that catalyses the pool of carriers) and propose their solutions.
2. SW Integration and Tuning: once the specifications have been agreed among technology providers and users, the two technologies will be integrated in order to create the new service. SATA and Divitech have to tune and integrate their technologies.
3. Service Installation, Validation and Evaluation: once the system is integrated (i.e. the Virtual Fleet site is available), the site functionality and the Virtual Fleet behaviour will be tested, validated and evaluated.
4. Exploitation and Dissemination: during the project, it will be showed to the other Sassuolo carriers the Virtual Fleet potentiality, extending the service. Besides, it will be disseminated at a European level the Sassuolo case solutions and results.

Milestones:
Key developments will be:
-An integrated set of tools able to provide the Virtual Fleet service. This set of tools concerns the optimising and work flow management tools, the monitoring tools and the access site.
- The GPS environment will be installed on the testing trucks.
- The testing carriers will be able to deal with the Virtual Fleet paradigm. This means that carriers will be able to collaborate each other via a WWW site, exploiting the TROP service.

Convocatoria de propuestas

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Coordinador

DEMOCENTER - CENTRO SERVIZI PER L'INNOVAZIONE SOCIETÀ CONSORTILE A RESPONSABILITÀ LIMITATA'
Aportación de la UE
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Dirección
Viale virgilio 55
Modena
Italia

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Participantes (4)