With the transport market growing and developing fast, UAB “Terra IT” pays particular attention to creating and improving technological solutions in the transport field. According to the Ministry of Transport and Communications, in 2017 the country's exports of transport services grew by 26.8% in a year, transport service revenue by 19%, and the gross value added (GVA) created in the sector increased by about 12%. In 2017, the number of companies operating in the transport services sector grew by 7.5% compared with 2016, and the number of their employees by 10.6%. Transport companies' turnover and investment in fleet renewal and intelligent products increased significantly. An analysis of Lithuania's export markets for transport services also shows rapidly growing exports of these services to Northern and Western European countries. Exports of transport services to Denmark grew by 80% in a year, and the German and French markets grew by more than 40%. In 2017, Germany became the largest export market for Lithuanian transport services, overtaking Russia, which had previously accounted for the largest market share, in both volume and growth rate.
To successfully enter the fast-growing transport (digitization) market with its technological solutions and thereby significantly increase its competitive advantage, the company implemented the project “Development of high value-added products for optimizing transport sector services using artificial intelligence (AI)”. Project duration: 24 months. Project value: EUR 603,999.02. Funding allocated to the project: EUR 419,208.87. The project was partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
The aim of the project was to create, based on research and experimental development, an intelligent system for optimizing transport sector services, comprising solutions for estimating multimodal transport costs based on historical and real-time data, rating transport service providers using artificial intelligence, dynamically setting car rental prices based on historical and publicly available data using artificial intelligence, and optimizing the communication process by automatically structuring text data. Within the intelligent system, 5 separate products were created that will enable freight transport and car rental companies to significantly reduce or eliminate employees' labor costs and the likelihood of errors, and will increase the speed of response to orders, which is especially relevant in the transport services sector for more efficient, higher-quality service.
The competitive, high value-added products successfully created during the project will directly increase the international competitiveness of the company, the Lithuanian economy and, at the same time, the Baltic Sea region.