The Physical Internet (PI) brings innovation and forward thinking to the supply chain industry of today where lack of interoperability and actors’ lack of cross-collaborations very often bring inefficiencies and high costs. The ICONET project has emphasised from the beginning the need for a testing ecosystem, where technical solution providers and users can research, design,…

The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a reference model that characterises and standardises the communication functions of the digital internet with regard to its underlying internal structure and technology. Its goal has always been the interoperability of diverse communication systems with standard communication rules. The model comprises of abstraction layers each serving the one above and being…

This issue launches our ICONET Animation describing the project, along with interesting pieces on simulation models, "Investigation of an automated dispute resolution mechanism" and "Realisation of the IoT-enabled PI environment"

ICONET is moving into an exciting phase of its technical development. One of the project partners, ITAINNOVA has created a comprehensive set of simulation models covering a wide array of logistics use cases, business cases and theoretical Physical Internet scenarios. Recent developments have enabled these simulations to benefit from other technical advances within ICONET, allowing…

The ICONET project aims to answer some of the most important PI network design questions, both from a research angle as well as from running pilot studies. It is addressing questions such as how the business model of the PI itself and all necessary players in the network should look like, which information technology developments…

ICONET is now in the second half of the project and is making good progress. The Partners have been presenting at many events to share the project vision and outputs so far including H2020 RTR19 on December 4th, Intermodal Europe in Hamburg on November 5th to 7th and the ICONET Workshop in Antwerp on December…

At the two-day meeting held in Brussels in late September, hosted by Marc Verelst at Procter & Gamble, the ICONET team discussed the progress made to date, and plans for the coming months. Makis Kouloumbis, ICONET’s project manager, summarised the timeline and schedule ahead of the mid-term review in March 2020, and David Ciprés of…

The physical internet aims to transform how freight is moved, stored, supplied and used, supporting a more sustainable and efficient system of global logistics. Over three days at Church House, in Westminster, London, presenters and attendees discussed the wide range of technical, organisational, policy and business enabling solutions and strategies that will be required to…

GPICS represents an abstraction of a PI supply chain network, based on the four Key PI capabilities which correspond to a different LL within ICONET. GPICS makes a representation of a real-world system by creating a conceptual model for a generic geographic area, a series of descriptive elements, the logical relationships relative to the components…

New ICT infrastructure and reference architecture to support Operations in future PI Logistics NETworks (ICONET) project started officially on the 1st of September 2018. ICONET is a 30 month project and will significantly extend the state of the art research and development around the Physical Internet (PI) concept in pursuit of a new networked architecture…