ICONET General Assembly January 2019
The ICONET Project held their first General Assembly on January 30th and 31st at the IBM Technology Campus in Dublin, Ireland. It was well attended with 28 representatives from all the Consortium Partners and hosted by IBM at their excellent offices outside Dublin.
The first day of the meeting focused on the technical goals of the project, in particular, the requirements that will facilitate the formalization of the Physical Internet Reference Architecture, considering the way that supply chain elements will interact and share data in the Physical Internet (PI). This interactive session outlined the vision of the technical research and progress to date. The Living Labs then gave an overview of their objectives and progress including their early questions of the technical research. This was a lively session with active participation of both the Technical Partners and the Living Lab representatives.
On the second day of the meeting, special guest speaker, Professor D J Rod Franklin from Kuehne Logistics University provided context for the ICONET research with his broad vision of the PI and its importance. Based on his perspective the Physical Internet could be the solution through facilitating collaborative processes and shared use of assets to the problems of the sub-optimised use of resources, the production of emissions, etc. To illustrate how the PI might evolve, he gave a resume of the early days of the Digital Internet.
He then offered a considerable insight of the PI purpose and vision, triggering a vivid discussion of the PI’s envisioned evolution roadmap and catalysts for this to happen. Finally, he advised the consortium to “keep it simple and not over complicate things”.
Next steps are:
- a meeting at FM Logistics premises in Paris, to discuss in more detail the Living Labs scope together with the Innovation plans and deliverables in a two-day meeting scheduled for May 22nd and 23rd
- Excitingly ICONET will participate in the 6th International PI Conference, on July 9th – 11th in London, hosting a workshop of its own (https://www.pi.events/).
