A shipment goes around the world - Organisation of an air-cargo transport instancing for case management.

As a use-case, we want to show the organisation of an air cargo shipment by a logistics service provider. This example is strongly simplified and makes no claim to be complete. 

However it shows essential characteristics for case management and allows its usage without needing additional specialization training. Below we describe all steps that are related to the transportation of the logistics service provider.

What actually does a Logistic Services Provider (LSP)? 

An LSP receives a customer (sender) request for transportation and conducts all necessary actions to transport the goods to the customers (receiver).  An LSP employee, hereafter refer to as forwarding agent is responsible for organizing and supervising the complete end-to-end transportation process.  For the transportation the forwarding agent, may use the LSP's own assets (e.g., trucks, storage etc.) or coordinate diverse third-party transport providers for the physical transportation of goods. For our scenario we assume that there is a third party logistics provider (e.g., 3PL¹) responsible for the physical transport of the goods. The assumed LSP owns storage for temporary warehousing and not any other asset. Thus, the assumed LSP organizes the physical transport by exclusively coordinating external service partners.

Figure 1: Transport Chain

A complete end-to-end transportation process is shown in Figure 1. Every task of the transport chain is optional (cf. Figure 1) except for the main carriage. 

More particularly, the main tasks on a transport chain describe the following concepts:

• pre-carriage:  a route followed by a specific truck to deliver the freight from the customer' (receiver's) loading address to the address of main carriage.
• main-carriage: the main route followed for the transportation of the goods (in a typical scenario this is an airport-to-airport route).
• on-carriage: the route followed by a specific truck to deliver the freight from the airport of arrival to the customer's final address (receiver).

Besides the coordination of the physical transportation, an LSP offers additional services regarding the export and import of goods. For example:

• customs clearance: the LSP  undertakes the clearance of the goods for export / import or assigns this task to another service provider.
• transport insurance: upon customer's request (sender or receiver) the LSP communicates with an external partner for insuring the transaction.
• temporary warehousing: the LSP stores the transport goods in his own warehouse (typically near the departing airport).

The services to be executed by the LSP in a particular transport chain (pre-carriage, on-carriage, customs clearance, transport insurance, temporary warehousing) are defined by the customers (sender or receiver).

What is the typical process to assign a transport order?

As already discussed, customers request a service provider for different services regarding the transport chain. For example, it is possible that a customer may wish to organize the pre-carriage themselves. Therefore, the pre-carriage will not be part of the transport chain for this order. Furthermore, it is also possible that a customer constantly orders or unsubscribes from services. The subscription or unsubscription from orders might occur conditionally or unconditionally. It is possible for example, that a customer at a first step orders the transport via flight (required booking mapping to the task main-carriage) and additionally the export of the goods. Before the completion of the main-carriage task (i.e., while the goods are still on the airplane), the customer may also additionally add an import task to the transport chain. By communicating the forwarding agent the customer may then import the additional service.  For the representation of the aforementioned use cases may we can apply case management.

During a transportation chain, it is usual to have less sequential and planned information, as new events may happen at any time (see the example above). Nevertheless, there status of a transport chain introduces dependencies that limit the possible tasks to be added or cancelled during the transportation process. For example, if an airplane has departed, then requesting people for the export process is not sensible any mode. Similarly, in the case that a product has arrived to its final destination (receiver customer), then booking another service is not sensible any more.

In this show case we plan to represent these dependencies with Case Management and more particularly with CMMN.

In the following link you can find an introduction of a Case Model for a transportation application.

^₁ see Wikipedia for more information