Long distance traffic networks

As intensive competition and decreasing profits in the transportation service sector are still a crucially important subject when thinking of the strategic orientation of a company, innovative concepts to configure and optimize traffics and networks are needed. Concerning long distance traffic affairs, one idea is to ply a partner spreading long distance traffic network. Thus huge amounts of orders could be combined and wide spreading synergies and pooling effects could be exploited. To be able to handle, plan and optimize such a complex network a special software tool is necessary. This paper formulates the requirements such a tool has to fulfil and shows up some approaches of how to develop and implement the tool.