In freight transportation, a waybill is an important document that contains essential information about a consignment. The focus of this thesis is on a multi-purpose electronic waybill (e-Waybill) service, which can provide the functions of a paper waybill, and which is capable of storing, at least, the information present in a paper waybill. In addition, the service can be used to support other existing Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services by utilizing on synergies with the existing services. Additionally, information entities from the e-Waybill service are investigated for the purpose of knowledge-building concerning freight flows.

A systematic review on state-of-the-art of the e-Waybill service reveals several limitations, such as limited focus on supporting ITS services. Five different conceptual e-Waybill solutions (that can be seen as abstract system designs for implementing the e-Waybill service) are proposed. The solutions are investigated for functional and technical requirements (non-functional requirements), which can potentially impose constraints on a potential system for implementing the e-Waybill service. Further, the service is investigated for information and functional synergies with other ITS services. For information synergy analysis, the required input information entities for different ITS services are identified; and if at least one information entity can be provided by an e-Waybill at the right location we regard it to be a synergy. Additionally, a service design method has been proposed for supporting the process of designing new ITS services, which primarily utilizes on functional synergies between the e-Waybill and different existing ITS services. The suggested method is applied for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service isto support the process of identifying when and where a consignment has been damaged and who was responsible when the damage occurred. Furthermore, information entities from e-Waybills are utilized for building improved knowledge concerning freight flows. A freight and route estimation method has been proposed for building improved knowledge, e.g., in national road administrations, on the movement of trucks and freight.

The results from this thesis can be used to support the choice of practical e-Waybill service implementation, which has the possibility to provide high synergy with ITS services. This may lead to a higher utilization of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions. Furthermore, the implemented e-Waybill service can be an enabler for collecting consignment and traffic data and converting the data into useful traffic information. In particular, the service can lead to increasing amounts of digitally stored data about consignments, which can lead to improved knowledge on the movement of freight and trucks. The knowledge may be helpful when making decisions concerning road taxes, fees, and infrastructure investments.

The Research Methodology in Software Engineering and Computer Science (RM) is a compulsory course that must be studied by graduate students at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) prior to undertaking their theses work. The course is focused on teaching research methods and techniques for data collection and analysis in the fields of Computer Science and Software Engineering. It is intended that the course should help students in practically applying appropriate research methods in different courses (in addition to the RM course) including their Master’s theses. However, it is believed that there exist deficiencies in the course due to which the course implementation (learning and assessment activities) as well as the performance of different participants (students, teachers, and evaluators) are affected negatively. In this article our aim is to investigate potential deficiencies in the RM course at BTH in order to provide a concrete evidence on the deficiencies faced by students, evaluators, and teachers in the course. Additionally, we suggest recommendations for resolving the identified deficiencies. Our findings gathered through semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and evaluators in the course are presented in this article. By identifying a total of twenty-one deficiencies from different perspectives, we found that there exist critical deficiencies at different levels within the course. Furthermore, in order to overcome the identified deficiencies, we suggest seven recommendations that may be implemented at different levels within the course and the study program. Our suggested recommendations, if implemented, will help in resolving deficiencies in the course, which may lead to achieving an improved teaching and learning in the RM course at BTH. 

An electronic waybill (e-Waybill) is a service whose purpose is to replace the paper waybill, which is a paper documents that traditionally follows a consignment during transport. An important purpose of the e-Waybill is to achieve a paperless flow of information during freight transport. In this paper, we investigate five e-Waybill solutions, that is, system design specifications for the e-Waybill, regarding their non-functional (technical) requirements. In addition, we discuss how well existing technologies are able to fulfil the identified requirements. We have identified that information storage, synchronization and conflict management, access control, and communication are important categories of technical requirements of the e-Waybill service. We argue that the identified technical requirements can be used to support the process of designing and implementing the e-Waybill service.

We present a method, which makes use of historical vehicle data and current vehicle observations in order to estimate 1) the route a vehicle has used and 2) the freight the vehicle carried along the estimated route. The method includes a learning phase and an estimation phase. In the learning phase, historical data about the movement of a vehicle and of the consignments allocated to the vehicle are used in order to build estimation models: one for route choice and one for freight allocation. In the estimation phase, the generated estimation models are used together with a sequence of observed positions for the vehicle as input in order to generate route and freight estimates. We have partly evaluated our method in an experimental study involving a medium-size Swedish transport operator. The results of the study indicate that supervised learning, in particular the algorithm Naive Bayes Multinomial Updatable, shows good route estimation performance even when significant amount of information about where the vehicle has traveled is missing. For the freight estimation, we used a method based on averaging the consignments on the historical known trips for the estimated route. We argue that the proposed method might contribute to building improved knowledge, e.g., in national road administrations, on the movement of trucks and freight.

We present results from a simulation study, whichwas designed for investigating the potential positive impacts, i.e., the invoicing and processing time, and financial savings,when using an electronic waybill instead of paper waybillsfor road-based freight transportation. The simulation modelis implemented in an experiment for three different scenarios,where the processing time for waybills at the freight loadingand unloading locations in a particular scenario differs fromother scenarios. The results indicate that a saving of 65%–99%in the invoicing time can be achieved when using an electronicwaybill instead of paper waybills. Our study can be helpful todecision makers, e.g., managers and staff dealing with paperwaybills, to estimate the potential benefits when making deci-sions concerning the implementation of an electronic waybillsolution for replacing paper waybills.

A waybill is a document that accompanies the freight during transportation. The document contains essential information such as, origin and destination of the freight, involved actors, and the type of freight being transported. We believe, the information from a waybill, when presented in an electronic format, can be utilized for building knowledge about the freight movement. The knowledge may be helpful for decision makers, e.g., freight transport companies and public authorities. In this paper, the results from a study of a Swedish transport company are presented using order data from a customer ordering database, which is, to a larger extent, similar to the information present in paper waybills. We have used the order data for predicting the type of freight moving between a particular origin and destination. Additionally, we have evaluated a number of different machine learning algorithms based on their prediction performances. The evaluation was based on their weighted average true-positive and false-positive rate, weighted average area under the curve, and weighted average recall values. We conclude, from the results, that the data from a waybill, when available in an electronic format, can be used to improve knowledge about freight transport. Additionally, we conclude that among the algorithms IBk, SMO, and LMT, IBk performed better by predicting the highest number of classes with higher weighted average values for true-positive and false-positive, and recall.

In this paper, we propose a method for supporting the process of designing Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services, which utilizes on primarily functional synergies with already existing services. Using synergies between services will enable sharing of resources, such as, information entities, functions and technical resources, which in turn may lead to reduced costs for implementing services. The method is built around an existing service description framework, which is used to describe both existing services and the service to be designed. In order to illustrate the usage of the suggested method, we have applied it for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service is to support the process of identifying when, where and why freight has been damaged, and which actor was responsible when the freight was damaged. The LITS service may lead to better quality control of consignments and may also facilitate the identification of which actor was responsible for the freight damage, which is of particular interest in multi-modal transport. By applying our service design method we were able to identify that three out of four functions of the LITS service already exist in other existing ITS services. Therefore, the LITS service can be designed based on synergies with these services.

We present a study on information synergy between an electronic waybill (e-Waybill) and intelligent transportation system (ITS) services. A waybill is an important transport document, and it contains essential information about a consignment. We consider five e-Waybill solutions, which differ in where the e-Waybill information is stored, read, and written. We analyse 20 ITS services, and for each of them, the required input entities that can be provided by an e-Waybill are identified, and the synergy with each of the e-Waybill solutions is determined based on the location of the e-Waybill information. The analysis shows that e-Waybill solutions with storage at the freight-level enable the highest information synergy with ITS services. Our result may support the implementation of practical e-Waybill systems that provide high synergy with ITS services, which may lead to higher utilisation of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate potential synergies between an electronic waybill (e-Waybill) and other Intelligent Transport System (ITS) services. An e-Waybill service, as presented in this thesis, should be able to perform the functions of a paper waybill (which is an important transport document and contains essential information about a consignment) and it should contain at least the information specified in a paper waybill. To investigate synergies between the e-Waybill solutions and ITS services, we present 5 conceptual e-Waybill solutions that differ in where the e-Waybill information is stored, read, and written. These solutions are further investigated for functional and technical requirements (non-functional requirements), which can potentially impose constraints on a potential system that should implement the e-Waybill service. A set of 20 ITS services are considered for synergy analysis in this thesis. These services are mainly for road transport, however most of them are relevant to be considered for utilization in other modes of transport as well. For information synergy analysis, the e-Waybill solutions are assessed based on their synergies with ITS services. For different ITS services, the required input information entities are identified; and if at least one information entity can be provided by an e-Waybill at the right location we regard it to be a synergy. The result from our synergy analysis may support the choice of practical e-Waybill systems, which has the possibility to provide high synergy with ITS services. This may lead to a higher utilization of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions. Additionally, a service design method has been proposed for supporting the process of designing new ITS services, which primarily utilizes on functional synergies with already existing ITS services. In order to illustrate the usage of the suggested method, we have applied it for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service is to support the process of identifying when, where, and by whom a consignment has been damaged and who was responsible when the consignment was damaged.

The focus of this paper is to present potential electronic waybill (e-waybill) solutions for a traditional waybill with the potential for supporting different Intelligent Transport System (ITS) services, such as, identification of freight, automating the exchange of content-related data for regulatory or commercial purposes, etc. At present there are some initiatives, for instance, by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the e-Freight framework, for achieving solutions that can handle e-waybills. Both these solutions focus on actor-to-actor communication, however we hypothesize that the storage of a waybill’s data both locally and centrally (i.e. actor-to-actor as well as goods-to-actor communication) can support more services than only central storage of the waybill’s data. Further we look at the information required and possible communication links between different actors in order to identify different ITS services that can be achieved through an e-waybill solution. We then map this information on to the e-waybill solutions that we have proposed, which will allow us to identify which services are supported by the different e-waybill solutions.