TRANSPORTATION NEWS

SNCF FRET Tests Prototype
Rules match contracts to customer requests

SNCF FRET, France's national rail freight service, has begun testing a system for matching contracts to its customers, using ILOG business rules for processing information and ILOG visualization for calling up and filling out contracts.

SNCF FRET transports a wide range of freight, from agricultural and petroleum products to merchandise and personal belongings. It moves about 130 million tons of freight annually, generating monthly invoices of $34 million.

Billing for such an operation is highly complex. Contracts are negotiated individually, and rates vary greatly with a wide variety of factors. To simplify the process for producing them, the rail service and a team of ILOG consultants have developed a prototype for a contract generator using ILOG Rules and ILOG Views.

The freight agent begins by entering terms specific to a shipment, such as the customer's name and the content and destination of the shipment, with a graphical interface built with ILOG Views. ILOG Rules uses the information to locate the appropriate contract, which is displayed by the interface. The operator then completes the form, with all the information on the shipment, and subsystem applications calculate the costs and determine routing information for logistics planning.

Currently undergoing test trials, the prototype will be refined using results from parallel usage with existing billing systems.

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Transco

Transco, the owner and operator of Britain's gas pipeline network, is developing the Network Manager System for monitoring and controlling the flow of gas, with ILOG visualization technology.

Part of the Lattice Group, Transco delivers gas from different suppliers via 275,000 kilometers of pipeline to more than 20 million consumers throughout the United Kingdom. To further ensure its safe and reliable service, the company launched the Ulysses project to create a real-time monitoring system that also allows users to control equipment.

The system needs powerful visualization software with accurate graphics and highly responsive interaction. After considering standard packages in the field of pipeline supervision, Transco selected ILOG JViews and ILOG Server. They will provide the much-needed high-speed performance, code accessibility in case of a system failure, real-time updates automatically sent to users, and a graphics editor allowing users to create custom graphic elements and views of the network.

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