The Logistics for LIFE project is glad to invite you all to its final event, on the 23rd-26th April 2012, in Athens. The event will take place at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre, in the occasion of the TRA Conference 2012. Read more »

 Currently there is a clear separation between road traffic management and freight management. The traffic management objectives are to ensure traffic safety for all road users and utilize the capacity while minimizing the environmental emissions. The freight distribution management objectives are to deliver freight in the most cost efficient way while ensuring the user requirements (where environmental aspect is included). The task of the driver of the vehicle can be separated into two parts, one part fulfilling the traffic management objectives, i.e. Read more »

 Generally speaking, which is also valid for the transport and logistics domains, we can differentiate the necessary ICT standards into standards for communication – how to actually communicate – and standards for information – what to actually exchange. This article refers to “technology standards” as those addressing the communication aspect, while standardization of the information exchanges content will be addressed in other articles. Read more »

 There has been a trend to only test and validate single technologies without looking beyond for how the different technologies work together in different research projects as well as in industry initiatives. Non-compatible technologies have lower probability of reaching the large markets, while a compatible products situation is stable independent of customer base sizes (Chen, et al., 2009). It is important for new technology developments to incorporate and complement what exists in the world outside of its organization or domain. Read more »

 A fundamental result of the ICT and business performance literature is that ICT is not a driver of performance per se (Francalanci and Morabito, 2008) and a significant impact of ICT is achievable when accompanied by organizational change and collaboration. Hence agreement on concepts, services and stakeholder involvement addresses the need to consider “soft issues”, such as organisational aspects and new business models. Read more »

 Expert consensus is that ICT can enable substantial sustainability improvement (Huschebeck et al., 2009 and Belella et al, 2009). While transport of people has gained substantial research interest it is still unclear how freight transport operations can be improved (Sternberg, 2011b). Usually significant effects (so called “aggregated level” effects) of ICT can only be achieved if several organizations adopt ICT and collaborate on streamlining business processes. Read more »

 Logistics industry is rather an ecosystem of different actors with different needs, acting in a very dynamic environment. Customer response, exception management, scheduling, prediction and forecasting are some of the key factors that have to be continuously improved and monitored in order to gain competitive advantage in such a demanding environment. Read more »

 Fleet planning and distribution optimization methods are mature topics from a research perspective, and they are implemented in a variety of transport management solutions available on the market. In the projected 2030 scenario, however, current centralized information management and decision support systems appear unable to support the optimization of globally distributed and heterogeneous logistic networks. Read more »

 To support creation of a new market of low-carbon services, environmental data collection and sharing should be widespread within and across the involved companies (carriers, logistics services providers and shippers). Currently there are ICT tools and platforms available to companies for collecting, processing and publishing data on logistic processes. Read more »