A Proposed Framework for Enhancing the Transportation Systems Based on Physical Internet and Data Science Techniques

Abstract

Logistics and supply chain processes nowadays are not sustainable and cause many problems. A traditional freight transportation system that moves the commodities between nodes of the supply chain takes a lot of time and cost. It accounts for large quantities of carbon dioxide emissions from fuel consumption. The physical internet aims to facilitate the flow of moving goods through modular units and sharing the resources to reduce time, effort, and cost. Also it helps to change the way of moving goods across participants of the supply chain and make the way physical goods are moved, handled, stored, and supplied across the world more economical, environment-friendly, socially-efficient and sustainable. As the participants of the supply chain will have access to share central hubs and transportation means, this will help them to move the commodities from one place to another more efficiently. This research takes Egypt as a case study to investigate the main transportation problems and how to apply physical internet to solve it. This paper aims to propose a framework to apply the physical internet with its tools and data science techniques to overcome transportation problems, as it will help to reduce transportation costs, reduce the harmful impact on the environment and enhance the transportation system to be more efficient, through building a pool of sharable resources and standardizing the goods to enhance collaboration between the participants of the supply chain. In addition to the use of neural networks that benefit the supply chain in many areas, it will support in decision making, forecasting, and choosing the optimal path for transportation.