Slot Booking App

Clusters 2.0 is a Horizon 2020 project setting up the potential of European Logistics Clusters for a sustainable, efficient and fully integrated transport system. 

It relies on the Ten-T Network of Logistics Clusters promoting the intermodality and supports local and European development, while keeping neutral the local impacts such as congestion, noise, land use and local pollution levels. 

This project facilitated the roll out, implementation and test for market fit of the Slot Booking Application. Slot Booking is a web application that assists the operations of freight delivery and pick-up in airports. The main impacts of its use are the reduced waiting and idle times (and therefore its costs), the optimization of personnel planning and the transparency and smoothness given to these processes.  The interface is shown below for better understanding:

Figure 1. Interface of the Slot Booking Application [1]

The users are Freight Forwarders as long as they can access an easy booking and avoid waiting, the Ground handlers because their capacity is smoothened and their processes are faster, and the Airport, which has more insight and a better performance. 

Many companies contributed in the roll-out and implementation of the tool, but was Nallian who continued to market and promoted to other airports and continued adding new functionalities and improvements. This tool is now part of its Truck Visit Management Solution. At the same time Air Cargo Belgium further support the Brussel community towards 100% of the application.  Both Nallian and Air Cargo kindly shared and confirmed the results of this report and also provided further information. 

Truck Visit Management represents a solution to coordinate and communicate with freight forwarders and trucking companies online and in real-time with a three-step process: A fast registration of the drivers and the shipment, the slot management itself, and the sharing of data to facilitate the exchange of freight details between trucking companies, freight forwarders and ground handlers.

This solution can be adapted to any business by selecting one of the packages of the Figure 13.

Figure 2. Truck Visit Management Modules of Nallian [2]

The project was implemented in the Brussels Airport community, where it’s made available on BRUcloud, the Brussels Airport Company implementation of the Nallian datasharing platform. On BRUcloud, several functionalities are offered to the Brussels Air Cargo community. The overview can be seen in the picture below (see Figure 14). The Slot Booking App is highlighted. 

Figure 3. BRUcloud Platform functionalities [3]

As has been discussed throughout the explanation of this implementation case, the application addresses pain points of different dimensions. Some of them are: congestion of the cargo hub, truck waiting times and inefficient resource planning among others.

After the project, the Brussels Airport community has further adopted and expanded the use of the application with support of Air Cargo Belgium.

During the project 15 companies joined and the solution has significantly reduced the waiting times, saving up to hours at peak times. The number of companies involved grew up to more than 50 after the Clusters 2.0 project. Currently, the BRU-achievements have been implemented in other airports internationally and are active now in Singapore (Changi), US (DFW, LAX) and Liege too. Further potential implementations planned in a number of big international airports and global rollout for a leading ground handling agent. The benefits and claims are more than frequent. Some of these claims are:

"With the Slot Booking app we achieved a 50% drop in waiting times on export and 25% on import, together with an immense cut in overtime for the drivers."

http://www.clusters20.eu/