International
Cognitive and Adaptive Networked
Enterprise (I.C.A.N.E.) Systems™

I.C.A.N.E. Systems LLC is a start-up organization looking to operate in the business and IT consulting, software development and IT industries with an initial focus in the Freight Transportation, Logistics and Supply Chain markets. We have identified multiple needs and opportunities for improving freight transport (from shipping/source to receiving/destination) efficiency, effectiveness, safety, and security through changes in dock worker communications and collaborations that may be addressed through disruptive solutions in (environmental) sensing, part/component tracking, trailer packing, on-dock freight transport, inter-terminal coordination, analytics, prediction and modelling, tasking, work flow and management. It is anticipated that these improvements can be achieved by creating hybrid sensor technologies / solutions, utilizing the concepts, principles and theories of the systems sciences (Complexity, Dynamical Systems, General Systems Theory, Complex Adaptive Systems, etc.) and making artificial intelligence ubiquitous and pervasive in every solution. The expected economic impact for individual carriers is cost reduction in the handling and transport of freight through improved routing and tracking, improved trailer packing, reductions in freight damage, improved planning and scheduling, theft reduction, improved monitoring for regulatory compliance and insurance reductions. These can in turn drive down shipping / receiving costs to a carrier's customers leading to improved sales to the carrier. Thus, I.C.A.N.E. Systems anticipates that margins can be significantly improved resulting in an improved competitive advantage that is reflected in an improved bottom and top line growth for carriers utilizing our products and services. Further, I.C.A.N. E. Systems believes that these economic and financial results will propagate to the carrier's customers and eventually throughout the economy.

Freight Transportation / Logistics / Supply and Demand Networks

Freight Transportation

The particular niche that I.C.A.N.E. Systems will be addressing immediately is freight handling and internal logistics, with associated dock and yard management, on freight terminals of LTL organizations in the U.S / North American truck freight transportation market. Truck freight transportation generates approximately 700 billion dollars year (2015) and is a fundamental platform for moving entire local and global economies. It is estimated that this accounted for 80% of all freight spending in the U.S. and is about 5% of the U.S. 2015 GDP of approximately 18 trillion dollars. There are over 0.5 million trucking businesses in the U.S. serving a network / economy consisting of 118.7 million households, 7.4 million businesses and 89,000 governmental units. Within this niche, our first priority will be the less-than-load (LTL) segment. The LTL market is about $37 billion with operating margins of 7-8% (2015). It is believed that the innovations embedded in our solutions, will enable operating margins to increase 2x by affecting bottom-line costs and top-line sales through improved efficiency, effectiveness, security and safety. This explicitly reflects a competitive advantage for individual carriers that use our products and services. I.C.A.N.E. systems will utilize initial successes in the LTL market to expand into other trucking segments followed by expansion into railroad, shipping, and air transport modes. Likewise, I.C.A.N.E. Systems will expand geographically into South America and eventually overseas. Concurrently, I.C.A.N.E. Systems will look to expand into other markets besides transportation such as any market where businesses have warehouses and manufacturing floors. Eventually, there will be a means to track any product from assembly to use, in real-time.

Approach

The unique and innovative freight transport solutions that I.C.A.N.E. Systems will be creating covers the entire gamut of software related to moving freight, including in part, dock and yard management (freight movers, supervisors, dock managers, safety representatives, etc.), sales, logistics, dispatch, maintenance / repair, terminal management, inter-terminal co-ordination and communications, enterprise integration and interoperability (e.g with ERP, CRM, Financials, HPC, Big Data, Analytics, Modeling), and B2B co-ordination. Some of the technologies that will be used to create these solutions include, but are not limited to: sensors (RFID/video), mobile/smart Devices, Artificial Intelligence, mesh/ad hoc wireless networks, Big Data, High Performance Computing and computer vision. These technologies working together as a solution empowers dock workers, individually and collectively in collaboration, to change they way they work, within and between docks, to reduce freight damage / loss and to increase efficiencies in freight movement and trailer packing. The initial focus will be on freight handling and internal logistics with associated dock and yard management functions of LTL docks.

Technology

Sensor/RFID/Internet of Things (IoT). One of the key set of technologies for creating I.C.A.N.E. Systems solutions is that of IoT technologies with a focus on RFID technology. We will explore and vet 3rd party RFID vendors for their RFID tags, readers / sensors, and possibily for their basic location and tracking software. Both passive and active RFID data will be used as basic input into our softare systems. Coupled with video camera technology (e,g. closed circuit T.V.), RFID / video hybrid technologies will be created for diverse applications concerned with security, trailer packing, etc.

Mobile / Wireless. Smart devices are an integral part of all of our solutions. In particular, ad-hoc mesh networks will play a big part in communication and collaboration services with the addition of some innovative security services.

Big Data technology will be used to store, manipulate and process the vast amount of raw data collected from sensors and derived data generated from business algorithms at local freight terminals and across all terminals owned by a company at the enterprise level. The design calls for the ability to share Big Data stores among terminals belonging to the same carrier.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a technology and technology architecture focused on computation of sophisticated parallel algorithms, many times using vast quantities of data, for the purpose of modeling, simulation and prediction of some difficult problem. In the present context, HPC will be used for real-time trailer packing, spatial-temporal freight distribution on the dock, task management for freight movers including freight mover collaboration (optimization of trailer loading / unloading), inter-terminal coordination and coherence, hybrid sensor tracking of freight, etc.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is intelligence manifested by machine. AI, in the form of groups of interconnected flexible and adaptable agents, will be embedded in almost every (sub)system of any solution created, and imbuing these (sub)systems with adaptability, reliability, agility and flexibility. In this way, AI will be pervasive and ubiquitous. This will enable dynamic emergence of control, command, coordination, cooperation and collaboration systems all of which can, concurrently and in parallel, dynamically anticipate, process and respond to events in the most effective and efficient manner to enable workers to fulfill tasks. These (sub)systems will be deployed over multiple decentralized devices which are able to self-organize.

Blockchain is a distributed database / ledger and software-based trust infrastructure technology that is being modified for high performance cryptography, hybrid cloud-enterprise hosting, hybrid public-private solutions and event-based (including transactions) tracking in freight transportation (part/component tracking) and supply-chain environments. This technology will, among other things, enable near real-time monitoring of freight transport location, provenance, quality and security, shipper-carrier-receiver issue resolution and transactions.

Integration of Technologies All of these technologies will be integrated to provide the most innovative solutions to the Freight Transportation industry, and to every business that ships / receives freight (parts / components) of any kind, anywhere in the world.

Architecture and Engineering

Best Practices. Model Driven Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, DevOps. For software development, we will be using a number of best practices including the Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture and standards for Service Oriented Architecture. In addition, DevOps will be used to provide to ability to quickly respond to any system notification of issues / problems and to customer requests.

Integrated, Interoperable and Collaborative Systems: Architecture and Engineering. One critical tool that will be used in creating software and embedding into enterprises is the Integrated, Interoperable and Collaborative Systems: Architecture and Engineering (IICSAE) System for full life-cycle management of the resulting systems created from its' use. IICSAE is grounded in the concepts, principles and theories of the systems sciences and systems engineering. The use of IICSAE ensures that systems (e.g. software systems and enterprises) are created with these concepts, principles and theories embedded in their design and implementation. This further ensures that all computations of all functions and services are accurate by taking into account these concepts, principles and theories and appropriately applying them, when the software is used, during the course of business activities and tasks, such as moving freight. This further ensures that freight transportation workers, complex adaptive systems themselves, get the appropriate information they require, particularly when interacting with each other.

Software

Business Functions and Services. I.C.A.N.E Systems has identified many unique and innovative functions and services for freight transportation that will increase both efficiency and effectiveness within and between dock terminals for a specific business and between businesses. These are generally grouped by role such as freight mover (forklift operator) dock supervisor, dock manager, safety representative, dispatcher, sales, logistics manager, etc., and by function such as freight unloading / unloading prioritization, freight traffic routing, trailer packing, freight mover collaboration, etc.

Support Functions and Services. Support services for the business functions include: multi-dimensional, real-time freight localization and mapping; multi-dimensional container (dock, trailer) body construction and scanning, container environment sensing (e.g. for gas, risk assessments, temperature, etc.); 3-D freight reconstruction and rendering with dimensional measures; integrated RFID-Video tracking; time-space hazardous materials mapping; traffic modeling, simulation and forecasting; anticipatory functions; DevOps

Security and Safety. Security and Safety are two, non-mutually exclusive sets of support functions and services which help to prevent loss and theft of freight, identify risks for both freight-related security and safety, warn of an impending accident to personal and / or damage to freight, execute real-time security and safety assessments and evaluations, and create historical records of events.

Business Services

Readiness Assessement and Solution Configuration. Before deployment and configuration of software and services, I.C.A.N.E. Systems will be able to perform a readiness assessment of freight terminals to identify areas that may need to be modified to optimize performance. Subsequent evaluations of optional configurations of hardware and software to further optimize performance and to maximize utility can then be performed I.C.A.N.E. Systems will ensure that all solutions will integrate, and be interoperable with, other customer systems such as ERP, financial systems, data bases / warehouses, customer freight applications not included in a deployment, etc. that the customer wishes as part of solution configuration tasks.

System Monitoring, Maintenance and Upgrading. Once deployed, hardware and software will be monitored 24/7. This will be done remotely at our systems distributed command and control center. Customers will also be able to monitor their systems if they chose. If the system deviates from specifications corrections will be made locally or remotely. One of the principle features of these services will be the use of DevOps which is explicitly built into these service.

(Inter-)Enterprise Architecture and Engineering. With I.C.A.N.E. Systems anticipated Enterprise Architecture Services, configurations are ensured to comply with customer's enterprise architecture. In addition, I.C.A.N.E. will be able to offer complete enterprise architectures for those who do not have one, or some part of an enterprise architecture to benefit the whole enterprise in the presence of our solutions.

Strategic, Tactical and Operational Planning. I.C.A.N.E. Systems will offer analytic services that utilize raw sensor data, customers business data, historical data, customer and market trends, and forcasting models to aid in the creation and evaluation of strategic, tactical and operational planning and plans.

Custom Software DevelopmentIn many cases I.C.A.N.E. Systems hope to partner with customer's as they seek to customize the out-of-the-box functions and services. We will offer software development services in those situations which will benefit the customer through added functionality, and hopefully, I.C.A.N.E. Systems through the possibility of improving our products and services. In addition, many of these partners may decide to become preferred customers, giving them for example, first looks at new functions and services.

Current Status: Financing and Employees

It is the intent of I.C.A.N.E. Systems to create software that, when deployed, is at least 2 generations ahead of, at the time, current offerings for Freight Transport / Logisitics / Supply and Demand markets. A number of systems have be identified for implementation. I.C.A.N.E. Systems is currently in the process of recruiting investors and acquiring a small team of contractors / employees that are highly skilled in technology, architecture and engineering, software development and management, and freight transportation. If you have questions on either, please email investors [at] icanesystems [dot] com or employees [at] icanesystems [dot] com.