key: cord-0914625-g08bmax2
authors: Dorofeev, Aleksey; Kurganov, Valery; Fillipova, Nadejda; Pashkova, Tatyana
title: Ensuring the integrity of transportation and logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic
date: 2020-12-31
journal: Transportation Research Procedia
DOI: 10.1016/j.trpro.2020.10.012
sha: fbb027ae2d3f0d1c1d5975ed2c09707634efa877
doc_id: 914625
cord_uid: g08bmax2

The unexpected, rapid spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus around the globe has almost completely paralyzed multiple industries in most nations. At the same time, even during lockdowns, many countries did practically no attempt to restrict road traffic, fearing that this would freeze the shipping of vital goods, primarily food. As a result, shipping by road transport has only been impacted by the drop in consumer demand. Nonetheless, shipping companies’ operations have undergone drastic changes due to the quarantine. Sending some of the personnel to work from home has been one of these changes. On the one hand, this has exacerbated certain risks. On the other hand, when personnel works from home, this helps reduce spending and may even be considered as a way of enforcing the lean transportation principle. The insights gained from remote controllers’ efforts to keep road shipping safe and reliable during the COVID-19 pandemic may find successful uses as a step towards greater shipping efficiency, not only in emergencies, but under other circumstances as well. In this paper, we consider the capabilities of a virtual machine-based architecture for a road shipping control system. We also elaborate on the practical results of deploying such an architecture. Our study proves that our concept of a geographically dispersed shipping company that uses a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Process Mining has the means to ensure productive remote controller operation, including operation through low-bandwidth Internet channels, and guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of the relevant business information.

The reliability of a shipping and logistics system depends on a number of factors that are relevant to the road transport infrastructure, specifically traffic safety. Multiple authors have written papers on traffic and environmental safety (Brylev et al. 2018 , Evtiukov et al. 2018a , 2018b , Ginzburg et al. 2017 , Kerimov et al. 2017 , Kurakina et al. 2018 , Marusin 2017a , 2017b , Marusin and Abliazov 2019 , Repin et al. 2018 , Safiullin et al. 2018 , Soo et al. 2020 , Vorozheikin et al. 2019 .

The state of shipping by road transport is often considered a litmus test for the entire economic situation in the region or country. The COVID-19 global pandemic, which swept through the world during the first six months of 2020, has left scarcely any economy unaffected (Cohen 2020 , Dryhurst et al. 2020 , He et al. 2020 , Zwanka and Buff 2020 . Among the most salient factors that have led to a GDP drop in many countries, is the plummeting oil price. The oil price was impacted by a number of processes, including the sharp drop in demand for gasoline and diesel fuel, as many people went into quarantine and various countries closed off their borders. This has further upset the balance in the global economic system (Ajami 2020) . In Russia, the exchange rate of the national currency -the rubleheavily depends on oil prices, and sustaining the demand for petrochemicals at a high level is among the local economy's most crucial incentives (Polbin et al. 2019) . In this context, domestic shipping by road transport contributes to stabilizing the demand for diesel fuel and gasoline, making it a potential driver of economic revival. This allows some Russian experts to make tentatively optimistic predictions that, as consumer demand begins to climb back up after the quarantine, the related shipping rise will spur on the demand for diesel fuel, especially considering the vast distances between Russian cities. This could be expected to result in a synergy that would breathe life back into the Russian economy.

That said, researchers and practicing experts that specialize in analyzing the dynamics of freight shipping by road transport in Russia, still find it difficult to promptly and accurately adjust their assessments of the market during the ongoing pandemic. The data from shipping companies is shared on the official website of the Russian Federal State Statistics Service with a long delay. Furthermore, these statistics reflect only the official information provided for taxation reasons. But in fact, there are numerous smaller shipping companies in the Russian market; these do not always report to government authorities. On November 15, 2015, Russia introduced the Platon system to facilitate charging fees for public federal road use. However, Platon only charges trucks with a maximum gross weight of over 12 tons, and its statistics are not publicly accessible. Therefore, while analyzing the changes in freight shipping demand, we used the data from the top Russian online shipping exchange and from prominent shipping companies.

As our first sample organization, we used Autotransinfo (www.ati.su), one of Russia's oldest shipping exchanges, which has been in the market since 1998. An analysis of the exchange's online statistics shows that the number of its website visitors has been dropping steadily: by 23.14% in March 2020 as compared to March 2019; 28.90% in April 2020 as compared to April 2019; and by 31.14% in May 2020 as compared to May 2019. Conversely, visit depth has taken a steep upward climb. For instance, in March 2020, visit depth increased by 48.89% as compared to March 2019; in April 2020, by 34.41% as compared to April 2019; and in May 2020, by 51.17% as compared to May 2019.

To summarize, what we are seeing is a dramatic stagnation in the Russian freight shipping market, caused by COVID-19. Those shipping companies that still remain are finding it very difficult to procure new orders, as signified by the spike in the online exchange's visit depth. In other words, shipping companies are forced to spend more time searching for orders. But even despite the notable stagnation, Autotransinfo experts say that freight shipping has suffered from the pandemic much less than tourism, retail, and the service sector. The quarantine and the resulting restrictions on travel have left shipping companies almost entirely unaffected. For instance, truck drivers entering the country with international shipments were made exempt from the mandatory 14-day quarantine. Furthermore, the Federal Service for Supervision of Transport issued a special order to cancel truck weighing from March 21 to April 25. The largest delivery companies were also feeling quite confident. To elaborate: the statistics collected on the websites of the largest companies that were making deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic looked as follows. While there was some overall drop in demand, it was clearly far from devastating. Several experts point out that the shipping companies' greatest risks were HR-related. Even though heavy truck drivers were not affected by the quarantine restrictions (they were only required to follow certain hygiene guidelines), some companies had trouble with having their drivers come to work. This occurred because the drivers were afraid of falling sick -and there have, indeed, been cases when truck drivers became infected with, and even killed by, COVID-19. What made the situation far more challenging for shipping and logistics companies was the need to work from home. Many of these companies' employees ran into difficulties when working from home, due to the low bandwidth of their Internet connection. In addition, installing a logistics management system on a home computer was fraught with technical difficulties and potential security risks.

Whereas simply moving a work computer from the office to the employee's home was often impossible due to security concerns. Nor did this solve the problems with data transfer speed between the remote home computer and the office.

Using WEB-oriented architecture and cloud-based applications to organize the shipping process may help remove these work-from-home issues (Dorofeev 2013) . In fact, the market is already fairly familiar with a number of complex specialized solutions, such as the 1C and SAP Cloud Platform systems, which may be applicable to vehicle monitoring as well (Burattin 2015 , Missbach et al. 2016 ). Nevertheless, even though quite a number of shipping companies do use WEB-oriented architecture to monitor their operations, many of them, particularly small and medium businesses, found that they are not ready for an emergency switch to remote cloud-based solutions.

The issues that we listed above require radical solutions if freight shipping is to run smoothly even despite the COVID-19 pandemic. But while radical, these are not temporary, emergency, or ad hoc measures. The fact is, when personnel works from home, it is an effective way of reducing shipping costs, and thus a step towards implementing a more progressive and productive organizational structure for shipping operations, compliant with the lean transportation concept (Palevich 2012) . Its advantages include:

• allowing controllers to work remotely even via low-bandwidth Internet channels;

• minimizing the labor intensity of software updates when the business processes change; • ensuring data integrity;

• supporting centralized access control while letting personnel use the information system's data and functions, as well as office applications and Word and Excel files.

This architecture's information system has only one processor block that connects to users with nothing but a monitor and a keyboard at their disposal (Wolf and Halter 2005) . The processor block receives a sequence of keyboardgenerated commands from all controllers and then returns the data in image form to the controllers' monitors. Unlike WEB services or network-based replication, there is no data sharing involved. This means that those operators that are using a personal computer do not have to install any additional applications. They work with a virtual application that is actually installed and running on the server side. This ensures a full emulation of a personal computer's operating system (Tickoo et al. 2009 ). In this case, the server (or the server cluster) allocates its own resources according to the following formula: where FP is the number of virtual processors, ECU is the processor's engine control unit; primary memory, in Gb, St is the hard drive storage, in Gb; Net is the network capacity. Therefore, ResV is the total amount of resources that could be allocated to creating a virtual machine, ResHw is the total computing capacity of all the hardware powering all the servers within the infrastructure, ResH is the total amount of resources required to ensure the operation of all the physical server distribution elements (hypervisors),

ResVM is the total amount of resources required for operating a single VM, m is the number of VM of any type that are active within the system at point in time t.

A virtual machine (VM) is a computing environment that is solely software-based and emulates a physical machine independently from any hardware, which allows a single computer to run several operating systems at once. There currently are several virtual machine solutions in the market, offered by different companies, such as Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Parallels, or Sun Microsystems. One of the most common tools that allows users to create virtual machines is the Microsoft Terminal Services solution, which is part of Windows Server. The application only needs to be installed on the server once; after that, several client-side desktops will be able to use the application simultaneously. In the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, this feature is called Remote Desktop Services (RDS); it has since been upgraded to support Windows Server 2012 R2. Building a remote desktop infrastructure involves a transformation of the physical client's operating system into a virtual machine and accessing this machine via a network. The sessions or applications running on each user's desktop use a shared processor or server memory. Next, a remote desktop protocol (RDP) allows the client computer to receive graphic output that reflects this session. Consequently, the application is able to be updated much faster, because all that the IT administrator needs to do is to upgrade the application on the server. Furthermore, when the application is visualized on a remote desktop, the network channel needs a much lower bandwidth than for working with a WEB application or service. The architecture also allows for turning even outdated, low-capacity computers or mobile devices with a variety of operating systems into a client-side work station. It makes working (including working from home) much more secure. Since data is only stored on the server and not shared over the network in any manner, security levels increase substantially.

Overall, the technical infrastructure of the shipping company's control system must fit the following criteria:

where Rs is the infrastructure's reliability, Ps is the infrastructure's productivity, Cs is the infrastructure's cost. If the goal is to reduce the cost, then the target function for the Cs parameter would be the full cost of the server hardware, which is a sum of the basic server platform (ci) and additional memory modules ( 

We must also bear in mind that each specific server si of a given model has a finite number of primary memory slots P, , 1... 

Furthermore, the total primary memory size across all servers where the technological infrastructure is deployed must be sufficient for ensuring that the required number of virtual machines operate properly

where NV is the minimal required number of virtual machines, and V is the memory size needed for a single virtual machine.

This allows us to depict the technological structure of a geographically dispersed shipping company that uses a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) as follows; where:

• The Session Broker Server balances the user traffic load;

• The VDI Gateway Server receives remote user requests through the Internet;

The Virtual Management Server controls virtual machines. The workstation access rights control is ensured within the Transport Management System (TMS), on the basis of applicable security policies. At the same time, in the case of, for instance, two-tier hierarchy (headquarters -remote employees), each remote employee is able to oversee only their own designated elements of the TMS (vehicles or drivers). Another highly relevant issue is controlling employee operations. Quite obviously, a physical office space gives the supervisor more opportunities to watch over the controllers' work, organize them, and detect behavioral violations. Remote work deprives the supervisor of direct control. In addition, it is a known fact that working from home has a significant negative impact on the employees' discipline levels.

To address this challenge, we have proposed, and tested in practice, the use of Process Mining tools to control remote employees (Becker and Intoyoad 2017 , Myers et al. 2018 , Valle et al. 2017 . The Process Mining concept is based on analyzing the information system's log files. As controllers work in the TMS, all of their actions are logged into a special file. Afterward, the controller operations are reconstructed and visualized in special software. To check how controllers are working from home, we used the Microsoft Power BI application with the PAFnow plugin (Chapela-Campa et al. 2019 , Knoll et al. 2019a , 2019b . 

The deployment of virtual tools at certain transportation companies has had a significant impact on helping employees work remotely and ensuring productivity even with low Internet bandwidth. As the spread of the COVID-19 infection led to a quarantine, many people decided to move from big cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg to the countryside, hoping to minimize the risk of infection. However, Internet speeds outside city limits tend to be very low. This is what makes virtual machines so important; by introducing them, shipping companies with a geographically dispersed business model ensure secure and uninterrupted work from home, in addition to protecting sensitive trade information, even when the employees use outdated desktop systems. Process Mining helps control all actions made by the remote user without having to personally supervise them. Overall, the solutions that we have proposed herein may also be beneficial outside of emergency situations like a pandemic. Allowing personnel to work remotely is one of the ways to cut shipping costs, which also facilitates the introduction of the lean transportation concept.

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