“protoPI” - Development of a prototypical Gateway to the Physical Internet

Within existing supply chains there is still a significant potential for the combination of part and single unit loads, but in many cases competing suppliers as well as fix contracted service providers hinder optimized truck fill rates and transport consolidation. To overcome these drawbacks, within the FFG-funded project “protoPI”, a team of Austrian research and business partners developed a) an integrated conceptual framework and b) a web-based transportation management platform in order to show and evaluate the potential of the PI approach to real life applications. By digitalizing the transport management process as far as possible, pooling systems for further developed returnable transportation items (RTIs) are made possible and significant potential cost savings in the delivery process can be identified, resulting from the use of specialized transport service providers (TSP). This could be of particular relevance for small and medium-sized enterprises, which in many cases are dependent on global forwarding companies.