PhD Defence Prince Singh

an integration platform for synchromodal transport

Prince Singh is a PhD student in the research group Services and CyberSecurity (SCS). His supervisor is prof.dr.ir. R.J. Wieringa from the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.

Transportation sector plays an important role in the growth of national economies. Advances in information technology have facilitated newcollaboration opportunities among transport companies. Ubiquitous and faster internet now enables transport companies to access real time data about events in a transport network. New collaboration opportunities and access to real time data, have given rise to new transport practices. Synchromodal Transport (SmT) or Synchromodality, is a new transport practice, where the route and transport mode for transporting cargo is chosen dynamically, i.e., while the cargo is in-transit. If a disruption event occurs, causing a delay in transportation, the cargo may be shifted to another transport mode. Existing research over SmT is biased towards routing and capacity planning challenges posed by SmT. Data integration challenges posed by SmT, have not received their due attention from researchers. The primary data integration challenge is the integration of contextual events data and transport planning data. This dissertation provides a solution to data integration challenges posed by SmT, by designing a Synchromodal Transport Integration Platform (SmTIP). This dissertation is useful for transport companies, researchers in transportation sector and information technology sector. Transport companies can get acquainted with, SmT processes, relevant contextual events, data integration challenges posed by SmT and how to overcome them.

Researchers in transportation sector, can use this dissertation as an introduction to SmT. It will help them understand SmT scenario, SmT processes and relevant disruption events. Documented responses of transport companies’ representatives during SmTIP validation will help researchers in the future improvement of SmTIP and in designing validation experiment setups. This dissertation enhances SmT research. It fills the research gap of SmT data integration challenges by: (1) identifying the data integration challenges, (2) listing the requirements for SmTIP, and (3) designing SmTIP to overcome them. Researchers and practitioners in information technology, can use the reference architecture for integration platforms to address data integration challenges in different application domains. For that purpose, the refinement of the reference architecture to SmT domain, as shown in this dissertation, may be used as a guide.