On the development of a web-based system for transportation services

This paper reports on issues raised during the development of an intelligent web-based system for transportation services. Our approach exploits software agents technology to efficiently handle simple or modular transportation requests. The agents involved in the proposed system represent and act on behalf of two basic types of users involved in a transportation scenario, that is, for customers looking for the appropriate way to ship their products, and for transportation companies (carriers) that may-fully or partially-carry out such requests. In addition, they cooperate with two special-purpose agents, namely the Broker and the Itinerary Builder, which act as intermediates between customers and carriers, and facilitate the overall management of transportation transactions by coordinating request and offers, constructing possible alternative solutions and facilitating the required decision-making. We provide a process-oriented description of the proposed system, report on the specification of agents' roles and interactions, and discuss various implementation issues. Particular attention is paid to the construction of modular transportation solutions, that is solutions that fragment the itinerary requested to a set of subroutes that may involve different transportation means. The corresponding algorithm and tool developed for this process are comprehensively presented. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.