FLOX II - Freight Collaboration Platform, industrial research

英国货运业是一个价值1570亿英镑的行业，长期受到运力利用率不足、环境破坏和交通拥堵加剧的困扰。2050年二氧化碳减排目标为零，这就要求对物流管理采取激进的方法。FLOX-II项目旨在建立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容量共享机会，大大简化和积极促进公司间的协作。多年来，业界一直试图通过各种各样的举措来应对这一挑战，但迄今为止收效甚微。直到最近，多代理架构和优化算法的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，从而消除了人工编排的需要，从而降低了公司的交易成本。这就是为什么VCL启动了这个项目来构建并随后试用这个革命性的基于云的平台的原型。一些地方交通部门和我们的行业合作伙伴已经表示有兴趣用他们的数据和用户反馈来支持这个项目，这将确保可用性、所需的功能、性能和目标效益的交付。

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.