Abstract

Today enterprises have to distribute their final products to far away consumers. It is difficult and not cost effective for these enterprises to manage their own transport vehicles. Thus, they outsource their transportation tasks to third party logistics (3PL) companies. These 3PL companies take transport orders from several clients and try to group them in the vehicles to utilize their resources at maximum. An issue of interoperability arises, when 3PL companies have to process different transport orders arriving from several clients in different formats and terminologies. Secondly, how 3PLS will collaborate with other 3PL companies following different working standards and also for collaboratively delivering transport orders which single 3PL cannot deliver alone due to its limited operational geographic area. Interoperability to achieve collaborative transportation planning is our concern in the context of this paper. Interoperability is a key issue for collaboration, especially in case of heterogeneous environment, when entities trying to collaborate have different ways of functioning and follow certain standards specific to their organizations. So the objective of this paper is to present a distributed and interoperable architecture for planning transportation activities of multiple logistics enterprises aiming at a better use of transport resources and by grouping transport orders of several manufacturers for each effective displacement. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book