Efficient and Reliable Transportation of Consignments (ERTOC)

Introduction

This paper describes a new initiative launched by Ricardo UK, Unipart Logistics, IRIS Technology, GS1 UK and Coventry University to drive business improvement and sustainability throughout the supply chain from factory to point of sale. ERTOC is a two-year collaborative project aiming to develop a standards based open architecture data hub to deliver accurate information for transport operators and their customers to use and improve business efficiency and effectiveness.

The focus of the project is to demonstrate how a standardised data hub can track the carbon costs of transport at consignment level. By understanding the true environmental costs involved, users will be able to compare and assess different transport options to make better informed choices. The project will also develop a demonstration application that will use the information required for carbon tracking to show how a data centric open architecture can deliver new functions.

ERTOC aims to provide information that will drive the following benefits to transport operators, retailers, manufacturers and regulators. This will be achieved by

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  Transport optimization, through the comparison of the true environmental costs of different modes of surface transport,

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  Improved process efficiency, through the simplified and standardised flow of information between transport users and providers,

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  Reduction in energy consumption and emissions, by providing standardised access to driver behaviour data, and

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  Improved supply chain visibility, by providing timely information on the status and location of consignments.

Existing tracking systems are not integrated, expensive, closed and provide limited, vehicle centric information. ERTOC is designed to provide near real-time tracking of carbon emissions and provides for a single interface to multiple sources of data, allowing users in the transport and logistics sectors to be able to dynamically optimize operations at a consignment level. This offers a truly innovative systems for the sector and aims at convergence of all sources of transport and traffic data.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The following section presents the motivation for carbon tracking in the logistics sector. This is followed by an in-depth examination of the technical architecture underlying the ERTOC system. A test strategy for the entire system is subsequently discussed. The adoption of standards and design security is then examined in relevant detail. The last section concludes the paper.