Introduction to transport optimisation tools developed by the KASSETTS project

The Institute for Transport and Logistics Foundation, together with seven European partners belonging to the Central Europe territories, launched an initiative to establish a European ICT network to optimize and improve the transnational logistic flows of manufacturing companies within the project KASSETTS. The project was implemented through the CENTRAL EUROPE Programme co-financed by the ERDF.

Transport, logistics and related ICT services play a fundamental role for SMEs as they represent the strategic leverages on the Central Europe markets.This kind of services should be integrated in procurement and distribution chains. Nevertheless SMEs EU logistics management is far from being optimal and SMEs can hardly access optimized transnational transport solutions because of:

• small shipping and low frequency of their transports, generating a scattered transport demand, producing a large number of non-saturated running vehicles and low use of intermodal transport (with increasing transport emissions);
• their low level of ICT endowment limiting their accessibility to the logistic supply.

KASSETTS can solve these problems through a stable EU operative ICT network of logistics brokers, based on open source policy, in which every broker is a joint logistic office among SMEs that: daily collects manufacturing SMEs transport orders with interfaces to their IT systems; aggregates (critical mass) and optimizes SMEs demand in terms of vehicles routes and transport means use at regional and transnational level in dynamic combination with other similar brokers; plans optimal logistics transnational chains on the base of destinations/quantity/timing of shipping of different local groups of manufacturing SMEs; interfaces this optimized demand to logistics operators (road and intermodal).

The international broker network has been functioning since the end of 2010 (November – December). The pilot period lasted from November 2010 till November 2011. Generally, the number of cooperating companies and the numbers of orders received per month has been increasing, but there have also been periods with lower or no activity at the partner level. In spite of this, the network as a whole has been able of consistently achieving positive results for the involved users.

By comparing KASSETTS results with those from standard transport organization models, several benefits were identified. The table below presents an overview of the savings achieved by the partners. The last column presents the average savings:

Following the link below, it is possible to access an online manual and interactive training materials for the developed software. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in using the software or to collaborate with us in its further development. 

		KASSETTS online manual    (click on the icon to open)
		KASSETTS interactive training material - video 1     (click on the icon to open)
		KASSETTS interactive training material - video 2     (click on the icon to open)