Intelligent Products for Monitoring and Control of Road-Based Logistics

This paper presents a new architecture of an intelligent information system for monitoring and control of road-based logistics. The typical business of road-based logistic companies is to transport goods from a certain source to a certain destination by the use of trucks. During the actual transportation of goods, small disturbances such as delays or wrongly loaded goods can prevent the original plan from being executed as intended. Some of the main problems caused by these disturbances, and how they are currently dealt with, are investigated in a medium-sized logistics company. Typically, traditional planning and control systems have difficulties handling these kinds of problems effectively. However, recent technological developments, such as intelligent products, enable new solutions in the field of information systems. Therefore, a new system architecture is proposed here to tackle the outlined problems. The system is designed to detect local disturbances in real-time, and solutions to problems caused by these disturbances can be presented to the users directly. This approach is validated through an evaluation method based on real-life descriptive scenarios.