Agent-Supported Information Retrieval for Tracking and Tracing

In recent years interorganizational communication and coordination have relied increasingly on the exchange of EDIFACT-messages. This is especially true for the logistics sector. In order for the sender to keep control over the forwarder's proper delivery process, status messages prove that certain milestones have been achieved. Taking into account that only a very small number of shipments face problems leading to a delay in delivery, this principle of pushed information causes a large amount of unnecessary EDIFACT-messages. In addition, many for-warders already allow their customers to request status information via WWW. A software agent based concept is presented to cope with the problem described, taking advantage of the WWW-services provided. The system called ECTL-Monitor (Electronic Commerce Transport Logistics) was developed in cooperation with a large company sending more than 10 million shipments per year. The main idea of the concept is to leave data of the transport process on the forwarders' computer systems and to access these remote system when necessary. On demand software agents collect status information of all forwarders involved in the transportation chain, which very often includes up to four diierent logistics service companies.