A formal framework for cooperative logistics management

Abstract

This paper presents a process calculus for specifying and reasoning about earth-friendly logistics management systems. It is necessary to reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions resulting from transport on account of environmental protection. Cooperative logistics enables multiple shippers to share trucks. It has been one of the most effective and popular solutions to this problem, but it makes it be complicated to implement in a logistics management system. We propose a language for specifying the routes of trucks and an order relation between the requirements of routes and the possible routes of trucks. The former is formulated as process calculus and the latter selects suitable trucks according to their routes. Our language and selection mechanism were implemented on a PaaS-based cloud computing infrastructure. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.