In order to be able to transport agricultural products produced by small-scale farms to regional retailers, processors, restaurateurs, etc. in small quantities in an economically viable manner, digitalization is the key. Only through the largely automatic generation of transport offers from the existing systems and the optimization of transport requests the costs per transported item can be reduced to such an extent that the transports are economically worthwhile. Micro-hubs also expand the possibilities for handling goods and thus contribute to greater bundling of tours and ultimately to a reduction in costs. The overall goal of the approach is to (a) allow restaurateurs, processors and retailers to order and pay for regionally produced food via a B2B platform and (b) provide logistics to bring the ordered food from the producers to the customers mentioned under (a). The transport should be economical overall through bundling (integration of anyway tours and micro-hubs).
The PENOA project will conceptually deal with the overall system and its components in the sense of initialization management. This includes, above all, the specification of the requirements and the in-depth investigation of the expected future benefits of the PENOA system using simulation. A model of transport offers and transport requests in the project regions should be created and applied. Based on various scenarios, a statement should be made about what economic benefits the PENOA system would bring. If long-term economic viability is demonstrated, the next step is to estimate in detail the technical, organizational and legal work required for implementation.
