Abstract
PurposeIn difficult geographical zones (mountain, intra-cities areas, etc.), many shippers, from small and medium enterprises to individuals, may demand delivery of different food products (fresh, refrigerated, frozen, etc.) in small quantities. On the other side, carrier companies wish to use their vehicles optimally. Taking into account the perishability constraints (short-shelflife, temperature limits, etc.) of the transported food products and environmental constraints (pollution, carbon impact) while consolidating multiple kinds of food products to use vehicles optimally is not achieved by current transportation planning solutions. The purpose of this paper is to present an interoperable solution of a marketplace, formed by shippers and carriers, dedicated to the schedule of food transport orders.Design/methodology/approachThis transportation planning system named Interoperable-Pathfinder, Order, Vehicle, Environment and Supervisor (I-POVES) is an interoperable multi-agent system, based on the SCEP (supervisor, customer, environment and producer) model (Archimede and Coudert, 2001). Ontologies are developed to create the planning marketplace comprising demands and offers from different sources (multiple shippers and carriers).FindingsA hierarchy ontology for food products. A transporter system ontology. A global ontology that contains all shared concepts used by local ontologies of both shippers and carriers. I-POVES an interoperable model, which facilitates collaboration between carriers and their shippers through its active agents.Practical implicationsI-POVES is tested on a case study from the TECCAS Poctefa project, comprising transport and food companies from both sides of the Pyrenees (France and Spain).Originality/valueThere has been much work in the literature on the delivery of products, but very few on the delivery of food products. Work related to delivery of food products focuses mostly on timely delivery for avoiding its wastage. In this paper, constraints related to food products and to environment (pollution and carbon impact) of transport resources are taken into account while planning the delivery.
Highlights
In the transportation domain, distribution of large volumes is receiving greater attention (Ulku, 2012)
This study focuses on comparing transportation costs of individual transporter with costs of the system in joint route planning formulated with the vehicle routing problem (VRP)
I-POVES’s functionality, is not limited into these difficult zones, but its generic nature elevates its utilization in case of transportation planning of large volumes and faraway locations
Summary
Distribution of large volumes is receiving greater attention (Ulku, 2012). The decision is made through the process of auction and negotiation between the carriers offering the free space and other carriers to decide to accept the offer or not Reviewing both the collaboration techniques it can be deduced that through exchange of customer requests, carriers find an increase in the capacity usage, efficient resource management and reduction in total cost, while with capacity sharing, carriers find capital profit sharing and better rates of utilization of vehicles. Freight forwarder serves as a decision maker based on the information collected for all the customer orders, vehicle capacities and transportation costs They formulated the problem as a mixed-integer programing model. Our approach combines the characteristics of both order sharing and capacity sharing, which uses incremental auction-based mechanism for order assignment and construct the transportation network based on the ARP problem, where routes are already defined for vehicles with fixed capacities. Through mapping between previous carrier and product ontologies, following transport services are defined: FromOToBForA2, FromOToBForA22, FromOToBForA2, FromOToBForP1, FromBToCForA22, FromBToCForP1, FromCToDForA22, FromEToFForP1
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