Session Chair: Eric Ballot. Professor of Supply Chain and Logistics and Scientific Director of the Physical Internet Chair. Director Centre de Gestion Scientifique. Mines Paris Tech. PI Pioneer Award 2014.
This paper discusses the necessity of collaboration in transport logistics, outlining two contrary case studies (retailer amazon and the small-structured fresh vegetables sector in Austria). We question if an internalization of crucial logistical activities might also lead to an implementation of the basic concept of the Physical Internet (PI). On a first glance, in-sourcing is contradicting the PI mindset as there is only little collaboration in this setting. So far, we consider that especially the PI community should investigate this topic of developments in more detail. If the PI, or the main concepts of the PI, could be realized via internalization as carried out by e.g. amazon, one should think about loosening competition rules. Furthermore, we would like to encourage this discussion together with ALICE via the organization of an event during one of the next ALICE plenary meetings with corresponding representatives on the podium.
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.
Centralization and decentralization are the two common organizations in freight transport. The first relies on a central authority who optimizes and establishes transport plans for all carriers for global- interest, while the second, presented by the physical internet in this paper, lets carriers optimize their own transport plans for their self-interest. The outcome - efficiency and effectiveness - could be different. This paper aims to use the concept of Price of Anarchy (PoA) to compare the outcome of the two organizations. Due to the complexity of actual freight transport market, this paper adapts the gamification methodology to investigate the two organizations. A freight transport game was developed for simulation. The outcome of the two simulated are then compared. The results show that the centralization outperforms in terms of global efficiency and effectiveness; while decentralization is better individual incentive. However, the PoA varies depending on information revealed.