Abstract
To meet the challenges for more sustainable, effective and efficient transport services in global logistics, a new IT-paradigm is needed to harvest the opportunities that capabilities for situation awareness and real-time chain composition provide. The iCargo project provides such an advanced, highly distributed, IT infrastructure with, as fundamental features:
• | a highly distributed “system-of-systems” implementation with a minimum of centralized functionality, referred to as the “Hybrid Services Network” (HSN); | ||||
• | virtualization of the IT infrastructure (HSN) to shield the user from the complexities of the highly distributed implementation through the use of “access points”; | ||||
• | seamless interoperability by means of semantic technology deployed through semantic gateways. |
This paper elaborates these aspects of an interorganizational IT infrastructure for logistics. Additionally, the migration towards this innovative and advanced infrastructure is addressed.