Introducing Services and Protocols for Inter-Hub Transportation in the Physical Internet
Sahrish Jaleel Shaikh, Benoit Montreuil, Moussa Hodjat-Shamami, Ashish, Gupta

TL;DR
This paper proposes new protocols for inter-hub transportation in the Physical Internet, enabling dynamic, reliable, and sustainable consolidation and dispatch of modular containers using on-demand transportation services.
Contribution
It introduces generic protocols for hub operations that optimize container consolidation and transportation requests in the Physical Internet, considering demand variability and service terms.
Findings
Protocols improve efficiency and resilience in container consolidation.
Simulation shows effective handling of demand variability.
Promising results for real-world implementation.
Abstract
The Physical Internet (PI) puts high emphasis on enabling logistics to reliably perform at the speed mandated by and promised to customers, and to do so efficiently and sustainably. To do so, goods to be moved are encapsulated in modular containers and these are flowed from hub to hub in relay mode. At each hub, PI enables fast and efficient dynamic consolidation of sets of containers to be shipped together to next hubs. Each consolidated set is assigned to an appropriate vehicle so to enact the targeted transport. In this paper, we address the case where transportation service providers are available to provide vehicles and trailers of distinct dimensions on demand according to openly agreed and/or contracted terms. We describe the essence of such terms, notably relative to expected frequency distribution of transport requests, and expectations about time between request and arrival at…
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