Abstract
Due to the steadily increasing freight rates it is being searched in logistics for decades for methods to organize transports and their communication within the framework of international freight traffics more efficiently and sustainably. An idea emerging consistently in this context is the more efficient configuration and coordination of multimodal transport chains whereby freights are being transported by utilization of different transport carriers like e.g. ship, rail and road. Through a better intercommunication of the actors involved in a transport, also across different transport carriers, environmentally harmful emissions shall be reduced in the midterm, the costs on long distances shall be lowered and information asymmetries in single transport markets shall be mitigated. Different future- and innovation-oriented projects, like e.g. LOGFOR, CODE24 and CENTRAL EUROPE, make efforts to achieve measurable progress in this area. Within the framework of the CODE24 project the prototype ORFE of an online rail freight exchange has been developed at the Institute for Production and Industrial Information Management of the University of Duisburg-Essen. It demonstrates functionalities for a more transparent communication of available transport services and also supports the configuration of multimodal supply chains. The positive feedback within and outside of the project shows the actual demand for an online support of the service processes within the rail freight industry. For instance, the establishment of the first dedicated online rail freight exchanges in the year 2013 trace directly back to the efforts of the project partners within the CODE24 project. While it remains to be seen whether the hereby established products can permanently prove themselves on the market, the presented paper argues that such online marketplaces will be replaced by such with more innovative approaches in the long run. For though the described concept of an online freight exchange can reduce the non-transparency of single transport markets as well as the costs in case of sufficient participation, its way of communicating transport services carries other problems: the pure contactual mediation between potential business partners requires a high confidence in the communicating institution and cannot, even in case of believable neutrality of the marketplace operator, guarantee contractually binding business transactions as these have to take place outside of the online freight exchange after the contact initiation. From the point of view of the authors, these contact exchanges will be replaced by agent-based freight exchanges in the long run. Such an AFEX-system (“Agent-based Freight Exchange”) will provide a highly automatized and interconnected marketplace which provides the possibility for decentralized and autonomous agents to conclude independently a contract that is optimal for them in a completely transparent market activity from their point of view. The contractual binding auction of multimodal freight transport services is made possible through the application of a two-sided combinatorial auction model which allows the auction participants to submit offers and demands for combinations of transport services that shall be realized by means of different transport carriers. The paper at hand compares the past research and developmental results on online marketplaces for the communication of available transport services like ORFE with the conceptual bases as well as chosen prototypical characteristics of the sketched AFEX-system. Finally, an outlook on prospective, innovative concepts will be given which support the negotiation of contracts for multimodal transport services with multi-agent systems.
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Föhring, R., Zelewski, S. (2016). ORFE to AFEX—A Conceptual Look into the Future of Online Freight Exchange. In: Clausen, U., Friedrich, H., Thaller, C., Geiger, C. (eds) Commercial Transport. Lecture Notes in Logistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21266-1_16
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