Design of Electronic Commerce Infrastructure for.pdf

Design of Electronic Commerce Infrastructure for Cross-Border Postal Operations Yusong Pang Section Transport Engineering and Logistics Delft University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands Y.Pang@TUDelft.NL Abstract-In 2013, as a platform with the 22 largest postal companies in the world, the International Post Corporation has launched the e-Commerce Interconnected Programme (CIP) to setup a new cross-border electronic commerce infrastructure. The CIP aims to help international postal operators to provide more reliable services and operations with respect to more accurately and in-time tracking and tracing postal parcels. This paper investigates the opportunities and comes up with the design of a cross-border parcel handling infrastructure. The low level infrastructure is implemented based on radio frequency identification technology for tracking parcels in international shipments. The high level infrastructure can be achieved via a generic information integration framework. The implementation of the tracking and tracing system shows the increased visibility during international e-commerce activities. Keywords-RFID; electronic commerce; parcels, tracking and tracing, International Post Corporation (IPC) I. INTRODUCTION Due to the rise of digitalization and the utilization of internet, the amount of surface mails has been extremely declined all over the world in the last decade. It has led to an increased threat and competition in the value chain of worldwide postal business. Electronic ecommerce (e- commerce), which is in the modalities such as web shops, online sales and internet retailers (e-tailers), has become one main business approach in recent years which involves into our daily life. In 2013, it was accounted for around $65 billion e- commerce in the second quarter in American, although it seemed a lot note that this is only made up 5.8% of the total retail sales [1]. In Europe, it has been identified that the delivery of