Guided navigation – Ewals Cargo Care

 Overview

Company Description

Ewals Cargo Care is a family owned transportation company, which is founded in 1906 by Alfons Ewals. The main office is found in Tegelen near Venlo. Besides this, Ewals has 29 other offices in Europe, which lead to a local presence in 14 European countries with approximately 2.000 employees.

The organization has grown into a strong international player. Our customers are offered a broad spectrum of logistics products ranging from full loads, part- and project loads, Control Tower set-ups and Value Added Logistics to global forwarding. Especially, but certainly not exclusively, we are known for our European multimodal network that includes more than 3500 Mega Huckepack XL(S) trailers. Ewals is continuously improving work processes and investing in the development of our employees.

Within the company, ICT Solutions falls under the Corporate Information Management department. The ICT solution department is responsible for translating business processes needs into software solutions. 

Project Description

Project description:

Within the intermodal transport business with relatively low margins, searching for the most cost optimal route is of high importance for the continuity of our business. In the past we build an algorithm to search for the best intermodal route based real time ferry/train cost and average traction cost. But for all part of this route that took place over land we completely relied on our external PTV plugin that returns the KM’s of the route based on a standardized 40T truck profile.

This profile optimizes mostly on time but not on costs. It consist of multiple parameters such as toll avoidance, time optimization, highway avoidance etc. We figured out that for multiple regions a dynamic profile with a customized set of parameters let to more cost optimal routes. Within our so called Guided navigation (Dynamic PTV) project we try to figure out which profiles we need to create and for routes which profiles would cost optimal within our network. This to help us to instruct our drivers to take the most cost optimal route by sending out a guided navigation with waypoints.

Goals of the project:

Goal of the project is to get insight in the potential savings we can realize when we replace our current KM payment based on internal distance tables, with the new dynamic PTV profiles. Furthermore we would like to create an adaptive model that helps us to rapidly respond to new circumstances so we can keep creating cost optimal routes based on dynamic profiles.

Deliverables:

1. Set off Dynamic PTV profiles and insight in which parameters to variate with within these profiles
2. A model that calculates which dynamic profiles should be used for which routes.
3. A model with Simulation possibilities. The PTV components change every half a year (new map with new roads etc.). So we would like to be able to adapt rapidly to these new circumstances.
4. Market/literature study about alternatives for PTV as a tool for determining the road routes. Is PTV the best tool for our puzzle.

Essential student knowledge:

• Supply chain / logistics, technical business administration , econometrics
• Modelling
• Programming (low code/thinkwise, python, C#, C++, php)

More information: escf@tue.nl