Towards a physical Internet: industrial and logistics clusters, standardization of the digital container and implementation timeline

Abstract

In this article, we are talking about the European road map for the implementation of the physical Internet.  Physical Internet (PI) creates the newest infrastructure in the supply chain, which allows transforming the existing logistics system into a universally interconnected system. It aims to address economic, environmental and social sustainability issues in traditional logistics. The physical internet is a new concept in supply chain logistics with the potential to modernize loading and unloading operations, logistics and facility design to improve economic, environmental and social efficiency. The physical internet is a vision for moving physical objects using a set of processes, procedures, systems, and mechanisms from a source to the desired destination in a way that the digital internet moves packets of information from a server to another computer. The PI structure is based on standard and intelligent modular PI containers or π containers that can be transported by any means (e.g. airplanes, trucks, barges, drones and private vehicles) and many of these containers already exist and are in active use. PI containers are already modular in size, ranging from small parcels to large sea containers that travel through multimodal distributed transport networks, where transit platforms bring together containers of different origins to optimize loading.