Transnational LOGistics' Improvement through Cloud computing and innovAtive cooperative business modeLs
Located in between old Member States and emerging markets in the East, Central Europe’s logistics sector has an enormous potential to add value to the region and create an employment opportunities. Challenged by rising demands on just-in-time delivery and increasing environmental costs of cargo transport, the interoperability of logistics businesses has become a critical success factor for the competitiveness of logistics hubs. High transaction costs due to the different standards in managing software systems represent bottlenecks especially for the collaboration between small businesses and global players with own systems. Latest technological developments and applied research have demonstrated that cloud computing might be just the right solution for this problem.

In the simplest of terms, cloud computing is an IT solution, where third party hosts your IT structure on a large remote server station with you having an access to it over the internet.  And as the access to modern IT tools has been identified as a key factor in enhancing competitiveness, a highly innovative IT tool has the potential to strengthen Central Europe‘s strategic importance for cargo transport between North and South, old and new EU members and evolving East European markets.

The cloud computing can therefore help to overcome the deficit in interoperability between actors in logistics networks concerning a single hub and moreover, a multi-cloud concept facilitates their transnational collaboration, e.g. enabling collective cargo transport by sustainable means (e.g. train instead of individual road transport). The project LOGICAL is based on and further develops the „InterLogGrid“ research project, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research,  where the cloud computing concept has been developed to overcome this bottleneck and is taking and tackling the problem on transnational level by unleashing the full potentials of a multi-cloud concept where a significant number of logistics hubs are connected virtually. 