WEB-Enabled Solution For Supporting Small Hauliers Collaboration

Abstract

Small hauliers enterprises are ever more requested to work with very fragmented freights that have to be delivered in a continuously decreasing time. Besides, their monitoring capabilities are not compliant with the market requests, that asks for continuous freight updates. Small hauliers are still not able to efficiently monitor their trucks and to organise their freights so that it is possible to optimise the load composition, reducing costs and increasing quality. Thus, it seems to be necessary a certain degree of collaboration with other small hauliers in order to gain the necessary business competitiveness. We here describe a “Virtual Fleet" WEB based service where small and independent hauliers share some resources (trucks) in order to reduce time wastes and costs. They can asks for goods delivery or declare their free resources to the Virtual Fleet. A WWW site collects the requests/declaration and computes the optimal plan to be proposed to the Virtual Fleet and negotiated among hauliers.