Researchers of the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS) have developed the "Cargotime" software, that allows to automatically track any movement of a cargo transported by sea carriers on container ships over the world. The above development is expected to make the work of logistics companies more efficient and convenient. Information about the cargo status can be monitored on the application's site by container numbers or received automatically via a telegram-bot.
Today, the share of sea transportation accounts for most of the cargo across the world; at that one of the leading directions is a transportation on container ships, that carries a variety of goods (from hairpins to tractors). Over the world exist several hundred large companies engaged in container shipping, and, consequently, responsible for the execution of large orders between ports, including between states.
Same time, the execution of small orders for private clients is often outsourced to a network of smaller logistics companies. They daily aggregate information about the movement of cargo in containers that move on ships of large companies along various routes (lines) and furnish it to the customers. Usually logistics companies track cargo loaded in a large number of containers, that can be transported on different ships along hundreds of different lines. Therefore, the daily manual monitoring of the status for each specific order requires a lot of labor on a part of the logistician, and in such an information flow, the probability of error increases.
"We have developed a free application that allows the logistician of sea transportations to automatically receive information about the status of containers with cargo that his company must deliver. At the same time, the specialist can upload this information on the application's website as a table, or track containers via a telegram-bot and automatically receive information on a status of objects. Since proposals to create such a service have arrived from industrial partners, we already have accumulated a stable pool of visitors: daily over one thousand potential clients visit the site," says Maxim Abramov, Head of the Laboratory of Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Problems of Informatics of SPC RAS.
The project got started as an aggregator site that collected and unified information about shipping companies, containers and their statuses based on databases of various directions. To collect information, the software adapts to the information system of each line. The researchers provided for the possibility of searching for any container (the location of the vessel, where it is located) by its unique 11-digit number. Now the application provides the user with the status of several containers at once in tabular form. In addition, the logistician can track the movement of goods, automatically receiving reports via a telegram-bot.
"Today, services for automatic tracking of containers’ shipping are rare on the market, say, we have no competitors in Russia yet. So far, we are tracking the cargo of the most demanded freight lines, and in the future we plan to cover all lines with our application," Maxim Abramov adds.
In addition, several auxiliary logistics services have been developed on the Cargotime website, and this development continues on the basis of SPC RAS. For instance, using one of them, allows for calculating automatically the cost of cargo delivery using the services of various logistics companies (DHL, FedEx and others), and choosing the most advantageous option. The development was carried out due to the support of LLC "Tazmar".