Autor: Klaus Richter

Mounting numbers of end customers and simultaneously declining delivery quantities are making more flexible organization of transport chains essential. Reductions of high-volume commercial transport are being demanded particularly in urban areas to cut traffic and CO2 emissions. This is the starting point for a low-volume commercial transport concept based on interchangeable containers that are combined over long distances to take advantage of established infrastructures in which interchangeable trailers are integrated and then separated in the “last mile” as required for pinpoint delivery to end customers. The interchangeable containers are supported by innovative I&C technologies for continuous cargo tracking and tracing and optimized and energy efficient routing. Automated approaches to consigning interchangeable container cargoes are being designed and tested.

The international exchange of goods and products is growing steadily. Information technologies now in use are unable to sufficiently organize the flows of goods both more securely and more reliably: Losses from misdirected containers, pallets and luggage run in the tens and hundreds of millions. Modern solutions not only have to provide the capability to positively identify mobile objects of different kinds and in changing environmental conditions but also to localize them, communicate with them, navigate them and control them.