TransLogisTIC

TransLogisTIC Project

March 2007 - February 2010
Financed by the Walloon Region as part of the "Marshall Plan" for Wallonia within the Cluster "Logistics in Wallonia".

The CESCM has been selected as member of the Walloon Region "Marshall Plan" Project TransLogisTIC in collaboration with Alstom, Thalès AleniaSpace, Trasys, Multitel, SNCB and B-Cargo. The Centre has been charged with the research and development of several aspects of the project:

• Developing a collaborative supply chain Internet platform: a Service Oriented Approach ;
• Management of the return flows of empty containers ;
• Economic models of the impact of Web-enabled collaborative tools on transport and logistic service providers.

We present below some of the aspects of this research. Further developments are still in progress and further research is still ongoing both within and out of the project. The reader is encouraged to send inquiries for further information to the contact person.

 

Developing a collaborative Supply Chain Internet Platform

Electronic collaboration (e-collaboration) is basically defined as collaboration using electronic technologies among different individuals to achieve a common task. This fuzzy definition can nevertheless be extended to incorporate business-to-business coordinated activities based on electronic technologies as for example managing a supply chain (SC) with a global software package. Indeed, in modern supply chains series of actors are interoperating to successfully combine the materials and flows to build value added products or services and bring them to their customers. When disposing of a common information tool the SC can be managed on a global basis with a direct effect on possible optimizations. Indeed when no collaboration exists, the actors only dispose of local operational information and take myopic decisions. When disposing of global information about the orders, resource requirements with expected quantities, schedules, etc. required by other actors, better decisions can be taken to schedule coming activities so that a global optimization can more easily be reached.

The TransLogisTIC research project has notably allowed modelling, designing and implementing of a multi-actor collaborative platform for supply chain management. More precisely, the platform is modelled using service-orientation; built around a multi-agent architecture and targeted to outbound logistics with consequently a strong focus on transportation. The platform main requirements are modelled as services allowing designing a flexible and adaptable software system that can be easily adopted on demand by software customers when changing requirements or adopting new technological advances. In that perspective, the use of COTS components into the platform is envisaged.

Multi-agent architectures are from primary interest in the perspective of developing a service-oriented system since agent characteristics as openness, flexibility, adaptability, learning, etc. are in accordance with the advantages service systems want to offer. The platform’s services are consequently designed through a multi-agent architecture. The software package implementation has led to a prototype; its evolution to an industrial scale is left for future work.