Challenge & Context

Global trade creates big opportunities and bigger challenges. A streamlined supply chain is vital for a smooth flow of goods. Logistics as a sector plays a critical role in defining the domestic and international competitiveness of any economy.

In the supply chain, multiple stakeholders manage their operations and information independently. This lack of streamlining leads to reduced workflow planning eventually causing delays in the container movement.

In recent years, a growing number of manufacturers and retailers have adopted the supply chain view to manage their businesses. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role in this process, assuring the linkages between chain participants as well as a more effective control of time, cost and quality of the service rendered.

The Government of India represented by National Industrial Corridor Development and Implementation Trust (NICDIT) and Japanese IT major NEC Corporation, collaborated to form a joint venture named DMICDC Logistics Data Services (DLDS).

The objective of DLDS is to effectively leverage ICT across the Indian Logistics Sector, providing best practices across the various processes and work towards efficiency in the supply chain. The company aims at bringing visibility and transparency in the logistics environment, streamline the operations across the supply chain and help in the government’s plan of improving the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) in India.

The flagship product of the company, called Logistics Data Bank System (LDB System), is an overarching solution that integrates the information available with various agencies across the supply chain to provide detailed real-time information within a single window. This trailblazing solution provides the export import container visibility service across the Western corridor of India along with comparative performance metrics. It is an end-to-end tracking system of container movement across all ports to the inland container depots, container freight stations and end users, via toll plazas and railway movement on an integrated basis.

The LDB system, currently covering 95% of Indian ports, is based on the FIWARE platform, and relies on several of its key features. According to Capt. Vinod Nair, VP Operations K-Line Shipping Line, LDB helps us to track the route and the movement of a container, which had met with an accident. This real-time tracking was of immense help to all the stakeholders.

Figure 1 . Data Flow

Figure 2 . Performance Benchmarking

Congestion Analysis Reports

Capturing and analyzing the transit time helps in identifying reasons for congestion in road and rail movement and in the nearby areas of ports, ICDs and CFSs.

LDB changes simple vertical data into horizontal valuable information. The LDB solution can be summarized in the following workflow:

• Preparation — Data collection from all stakeholders;
• Basic Search — Generating container information for tracking by users;

LDB Analytics — Analyzing information (Business Intelligence) and customizing it for stakeholders, to provide a stakeholder-oriented perspective and descriptive and predictive analysis.

How it works

LDB-FIWARE integration is a SaaS over PaaS designed to reduce the latency in reception and processing of data.

RFID readers are located across CFS/ICD/TollPlazas to capture the movement of containers. The LDB solution comprises two units — the FIWARE sub-system and LDB sub-system. The FIWARE sub-system is interfaced with RFID devices. FIWARE components or Generic Enablers (GEs) are able to capture the JSON format data from RFID and filter the data further as per specified business rules before passing on to the LDB application to further maintain the container trails.

The high available deployment model comprises FIWARE GEs along with the new component developed by NEC Technologies India (NECTI), i.e. VDG (Virtual Device Gateway).

VDG is a service, which consists of security abstraction, data validation and a work scheduler for other components in the IoT Platform. This component improves data reliability, performance and functional interface and it can be perceived and leveraged as a digital twin in the future.

Role of FIWARE GEs in LDB solution:

• IDM provides the device authentication;
• Wilma authenticates the received Json data;
• IoT Agent validates the JSON data against the registered data model;
• Rule Engine enriches the data based on defined pre-conditions and sends the enriched data to Orion context broker;
• Draco stores the data in a historical database. This database is used by LDB applications for search and tracking of freight containers.

In the LDB solution, the FIWARE IoT Platform has been enhanced from three viewpoints:

• Feature enhancement for design improvement, data reliability, smart data visualization and functional hardening of various FIWARE GEs e.g. IoT agents, Orion, Draco, Keyrock etc;
• Security for devices has been added to offer authentication, authorization in a generic way to leverage any kind of IDM and security abstraction. It also addresses the security issues of devices that may have limited computing power and find it hard to process security logics;
• Performance improvement from 300–400 transactions per sec to 25+k transaction per second has been achieved. NECTI has achieved this using its own component VDG (Virtual Device Gateway) along with FIWARE components.

Figure 3 . Ports in India where LDB is adopted

Figure 4 . Footprint Logistics

However, the benefits of LDB are not limited to the Logistics Industry only. It has made a huge difference to other areas like the Indian economy, environment, financial benefits for manufacturing companies and benefits for all stakeholders like Ports, CTOs and ICD/CFS.

Benefits to the Indian Government Economy

1. Reduced lead time for the overall import-export cycle;
2. Robust infrastructure for businesses to increase international competitiveness;
3. Boosting the manufacturing sector in India, leading to more employment opportunities.

Financial benefits

Reduced inventory-carrying costs for manufacturing companies, due to a shorter and more stable lead time, as well as a shorter inventory carrying period.

Environmental Benefits

Expansion of rail transport will improve environmental conditions, as rail is better than truck transport from the perspective of environmental preservation.

Stakeholders Benefits

1. Ports:
   • Better workforce planning;
   • Faster turnaround time;
   • Transparency in delays at ports where port operations are not accurate.
2. CTO:
   • Aid in better handshaking with other stakeholders;
   • Improvement in the quality of service promoting railways as a faster and cheaper mode of transport.
3. ICD/CFS:
   • Empty container management;
   • Demand forecasting;
   • Increase in containerized cargo.
4. NHAI (National Highway Authority of India)
   • Reconciliation of toll collections;
   • Analysis of chokepoints;
   • Better route planning.

Figure 5 . Architecture