Open Source Expert Community for the Air Cargo Sector

Dubai will be the meeting point from April 15 to 17 for the largest annual event in the international air freight industry: the World Cargo Symposium. With a comprehensive program of professional events, the World Trade Centre will serve as a stage for industry experts and decision-makers.

(Dortmund/Dubai) On-site, the Open Logistics Foundation (OLF) together with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is drawing attention to an important issue: How can the air freight industry master digital transformation even with limited IT capacities? Their approach: Open-source solutions that make new digital standards available to everyone. The partners aim to establish an independent open-source expert community for the air cargo sector.

That the air freight industry must engage with open source is beyond question for OLF partner Henk Mulder, Head of Digital Cargo at IATA: “Open-source solutions based on the IATA ONE Record standard are essential for our sector – especially organizations with little IT staff and hardly any development capacity must take action to remain competitive. The Open Logistics Foundation brings valuable experience to the table and has already launched large-scale open-source projects in the areas of eCMR, Track & Trace, or Emissions Reporting.”

Open Digital Solutions for All – New Air Freight Community

“The joint initiative of the Open Logistics Foundation and IATA is to establish an independent expert community to create new, open digital solutions for standardizing and automating freight processes in the air freight industry,” explains Andreas Nettsträter, CEO of OLF. “And these solutions should be usable by everyone. Therefore, open source is the key for us to a new and creative air freight community.”

This also addresses multimodal transport, connections to road logistics, and many other challenges in the industry. Andreas Nettsträter and OLF COO Carina Tüllmann want to convey their core message with a presentation on April 16 in Dubai on the topic “Global Open Source Community for Digital Freight: The Importance of a Global Digital Cargo Community and How It Improves Collaboration and Efficiency in the Industry.”

Support from Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML)

OLF and IATA are supported in their initiative by the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML), an internationally leading research institution. As part of the Digital Testbed Air Cargo (DTAC) project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), IML is leading the development of the open-source software NE:ONE. NE:ONE facilitates open data exchange based on the IATA ONE Record standard and is publicly available through the repository of the Open Logistics Foundation.

Photo: © IATA / Image Caption: Henk Mulder, Head of Digital Cargo at IATA