Development of Transportation Management System with the Use of Ontological and Architectural Approaches to Ensure Trucking Reliability

• Main Authors: Aleksey Dorofeev, Natalya Altukhova, Nadejda Filippova, Tatyana Pashkova, Mikhail Ponomarev
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: road transport; ontology; enterprise architecture; reliability; transportation management system
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/20/8504

With the wide variety of information systems and applications for motor transport and transport logistics control we have today, one may think we are already living in the digital era of general welfare, and digital tools would easily ensure sustainable development and prosperity of businesses. However, the experience of deployment and introduction of such solutions shows that their value for transport business is significantly lower than expected. Moreover, in some projects, business performance of transport companies had no correlation with introduction of information systems. In the best-case scenario, they provided for a slight decrease in document flow transaction costs. The change of the strategic status of a company in the transportation service market is a fairly complicated task, which, as analysis of literary sources shows, is achievable for few enterprises, primarily small and medium-sized businesses. Such situations show that information solutions were introduced without analyzing or assessing the business models of certain companies which could be used a basis for digital landscape of business as a whole. In recent years, the basic concept of forming a single information space of an enterprise has been the enterprise architecture. It provided for coordination between all the business processes in order to achieve a company’s strategic goals. The fundamentals of the concept were developed by J. Zachman in his famous Zachman Framework, and it was later developed with numerous models of enterprise architecture (e.g., TOGAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework), GERAM (Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology), DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework)). However, currently some researchers note that sustainable corporate development should stem not only from a “correct assembly” of all its business elements, which was the purpose of enterprise architecture, but also from the interaction of these elements when reaching the emergence effect. In this context, one should pay attention to comprehensive activity analysis of a transport and logistics business using ontological and architecture approaches.