An intercompany dispatch support system for intermodal transport chains

A critical problem in an intermodal transport chain is the direct meet at the transhipment nodes. This requires information technology and modern communication facilities as well as close collaboration between all the concerned transport operators in the chain. The TELETRUCK system (currently under development at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)) is a dispatch support system that tackles this problem. Inter-company planning, scheduling, and monitoring of inter-modal transport chains will be supported by our system. It aims at providing smooth access to railway time tables and rail based transport services and-much more important-at allowing for the planning of both, exclusively road based and combined journeys and showing their cost effectiveness. We describe our approach which is based on intelligent agent technology: both the current state of implementation and our goal of the very next future.