Communication is a key to efficient functioning of any system or process. Transport and communication are two processes which function in similar ways-their purpose is to move things from one location to another through networks.
Transport systems exist to move people and freight. Communications until recently have been primarily for and between people, but with the advent of IT, they can also be for and between machines.
Transport communications until recently have been primarily conducted by humans. But with the advances in computing and telecommunications technology, it is changing.
The significance is that in the past all transport control functions, decision making, planning was done by humans. With IT, it has become possible to have communications system when information can be transmitted, stored and processed independent of human beings. Forecast for transport and communications development shows no signs of slowing the speed and efficiency in the movement of people, goods and information.
Telecommunications technology automates the process of feeding information to computer or transfer information from one computer to another. The most significant of these capabilities from the transportation perspective are
- Bar-coding and
- Electronic data interchange (EDI).
In bar-coding, an item like a carton or a shipping container can be labeled with a bar-code which can be optically scanned. The scanner data can be directly fed to a computer, providing fast and accurate identification of the item.
In EDI, data is passed electronically in digital format from one computer to another (which can be in a different firm or agency) in such a manner that the receiving computer can process it directly.
For instance, a shipper may send a tracking inquiry to a carrier, a billing inquiry to a vendor or an invoice to a customer. These transactions would be received via EDI and processed by recipient’s data system and responses would get generated and transmitted via EDI to the shipper’s data system without human intervention.
