Chain management in container transport: A practical application

In the container transport industry, information and computer technology (ICT) is currently only used to support existing processes at an operational level. At a more strategic level, at which organizations negotiate with each other to come to agreements, ICT support is hardly used at all. Yet, at this strategic level, major impacts of ICT are expected: electronic auctions, e-commerce, electronic markets, negotiation support systems. To gain advantages of the use of ICT, a decision support system for chain management is designed. The decision support system consists of a database and a ‘model’ base. The database has been designed to make information available in an electronic matter. Great challenge in this was to find a good database structure for storing information with a different nature: trains follow a time schedule, trucks can drive at any moment in time, terminals have opening hours, tariffs depend on the type and weight of the container and the weight of goods, and so on. Even more challenging was to find algorithms for the model base to analyse the data. A multimodal and multi-criteria search algorithm has been developed for searching for the best route through the network of transport services, given certain criteria such as time, costs, environmental effect and reliability. The decision support system has been evaluated successfully in a laboratory setting. But since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it has recently been applied to an organization in the port of Rotterdam. This organization plays a forwarding role for about 60,000 containers per year. Although the database and the model base were designed in such a way that most situations could be handled, practice showed that even more detail was required. Practice furthermore showed that – although using ICT as designed has many potentials – it takes many smaller steps to reach the ultimate goals.