FLOX II - Freight Collaboration Platform, industrial research

英国的货运业规模高达1570亿英镑，长期遭受运力利用率不足、环境破坏和日益严重的交通拥堵之苦。2050年二氧化碳减排目标为零，要求采取激进的物流管理方法。FLOX-II项目旨在构建一个真正创新的货运协作平台的原型，并在现场环境中进行测试，该平台将通过实时识别负载匹配和运力共享机会，显著简化并积极促进公司间的协作。多年来，工业界一直试图通过各种举措来应对这一挑战，但迄今收效甚微。直到最近，多代理体系结构和优化算法创新才为潜在的软件平台铺平了道路，这些平台可以用于自动寻找解决方案，从而消除了手动协调的需要，从而消除了公司的交易成本。这就是VCL发起这个项目的原因，目的是构建并随后试验这个革命性的基于云的平台的原型。几个地方交通当局和我们的行业合作伙伴已经表示有兴趣通过他们的数据和用户反馈来支持该项目，这将确保可用性、所需功能、性能和目标效益交付。

Freight in the UK is a £157bn industry that chronically suffers from capacity underutilisation, environmental damage and worsening transport congestion. The 2050 CO2 reduction target to zero demands radical approaches to management of logistics. Project FLOX-II aims to build, and test in a live environment, a prototype of a truly innovative Freight Collaboration Platform that will significantly simplify and actively facilitate inter-company collaboration through real-time identification of load matching and capacity sharing opportunities. Industry has, for years, been trying to address this challenge with a variety of initiatives that have to-date delivered limited results. Only recently have the multi-agent architectures and optimisation algorithm innovations paved the way for potential software platforms that can be used to automate solution finding, eliminating the need for manual orchestration and thus transaction costs for companies. That is why VCL initiated this project to build and subsequently trial a prototype of this revolutionary cloud-based platform. Several Local Transport Authorities and our industry partners have already expressed interest in supporting the project with their data and user feedback which will ensure usability, required functionality, performance and the target benefit delivery.