LOG-protoPI - Modellentwicklung für ein regionales Physical Internet am Beispiel der Transporte zwischen OÖ und Stmk.

Part loads and single unit loads include a large proportion of inefficient use of transport capacity because of the nature of their structure, volumes, volatility and the differences in weights, dimensions, dates and destinations. Even logistics systems focused on this part of logistics as groupage freight forwarders suffer from a lack of filling degrees, empty runs and cost pressures in both modalities road and rail. Current logistics research recommends the visions and concepts of ""Physical Internet"" (PI) concerning new ways to avoid waste of resources, which is based on cross-company collaborations and cooperations as well as on the principle of resource sharing. Therefore, higher-level coordination instances are needed, whose mission is to increase the overall efficiency and the resulting reduction of traffic while increasing service levels.
The regional material flow between the federal states Upper Austria and Styria are quite well connected by the existing transport industry; however, because of the fragmented nature of individual deliveries from many different medium-sized companies as well as the special geographical and topological effects in European comparison they are poorly concentrated. Innovations of the Initiative Industrie 4.0 connect dislocated production sights to regional production clusters thus enabling high-quality planning and control, however, interfaces to connect logistics and their integration to the integral value networks with variable capacities are widely missing.
The scientific objective of the project protoPI is to identify inefficient part loads and single unit loads between Styria and Upper Austria within the existing supply chains and creating more transport efficiency as well as reducing the traffic through an intelligent cross-company (“smart”) logistics-system. Main objective of the project is the design of a pioneering cooperation model for the cargo management, which plans, consolidates and controls the single unit loads of all partners cross-company-wide via a designed Internet platform. According to that the fitting business model of asset and business sharing has to contain a set of rules (mathematical, organizational and legal) for a cross-company pooling of transport orders and transport capacities, that enables a win-win situation for all stakeholders of the whole system as well as ""fair"" service remunerations. Despite its ""openness"" it has to enable the maintenance of customer loyalty and data security. Further system components are the pooling of advanced reusable containers (PI-container) and the standardization of currently incomplete information flows and transport data between shippers, receivers and logistics companies.
An economic incentive of the PI concept is the option of getting flexible transport tariffs in comparison to the rigid ones now. This means that monetary improvements (operational savings) in future are fairly distributed not only among the system partners, but also among the clients in the sense of variable transparent rates. Such a principle generated for non-urgent freight additionally enables the possibility of using low-cost transport time windows and creates further optimization potential. (According to the principle: Non-urgent goods are transported, when remaining capacity is available.)
From a scientific perspective, the desired research result is a mathematically proven potential improvement, which results from the cross-company-use of variable available transport capacity in accordance to the ideals of the Physical Internet.