SmartBox - an Austrian PI solution leading to small loads mobility 4.0

Driven by the growing e-commerce sector the market for small loads like parcels is not characterized by sustainability in Europe. Constantly rising shipment volumes, increasing customer service awareness and growing demands for deliveries in best shipping quality and time accuracy drive existing distribution service systems into inefficiencies like multiple deliveries and underutilized truck capacities. After the investigation of actual systems and conditions on the Austrian CEP market a new PI-based business model is proposed to lead to a sustainable solution for a new and holistically optimized CEP market system. Key elements of the solution are an intelligent communication system (the “Hypersystem”) and necessary standardizations to make asset sharing possible. To support the environment friendly re-use of unit loads the “SmartBox” was developed as intelligent carrier for all stakeholders in an open distribution market as well as the “SmartTerminal” as effective decoupling point in the first and last mile of the delivery process. Considering the ideas of the Physical Internet (PI) this paper summarizes researched and engineered core elements of small load containers, the SmartBoxes, being essential for the implementation of sustainable future small loads distribution systems.