An Intelligent Decision Support System for Road Freight Transport

Abstract

This paper presents an Intelligent Decision Support System (IDSS) to optimize transport and logistics activities in a set of Portuguese companies currently operating in the freight transport sector. This IDSS comprises three main modules that can be used individually or chained together, dedicated to: a geographic clustering detection of transport services; a transport driver suggestion; and a route and truckload optimization. The IDSS was entirely designed and developed to support real-time data and it consists of an end-to-end solution (E2ES), given that it covers all the main transport and logistics processes since the registration in the database to the optimized transport plan. The entire set of functionalities inserted in the IDSS was designed and validated by freight transport sector experts from the different companies that will use the proposed system.