# Logistics & Supply Chain — Otonoma

Otonoma's intelligent network executes logistics plans reliably across the contractors, carriers, brokers, crews and ports a company does not control — forward and reverse.

## Execution across parties you don't control

Moving physical things — forward and reverse — depends on contractors, carriers, brokers, crews and ports that sit outside your own systems. The intelligent network turns each plan into work every one of them can act on, and keeps it moving when something changes.

## Your AI determines what should happen. The network makes it happen.

Planning and prediction tools are good at deciding what should happen next. Execution is where it breaks down: the work spans parties the customer does not control, and the hand-offs between them are still emails, phone calls and paperwork. It isn't a planning problem. It's an integration problem.

The intelligent network enables the decision to happen reliably across every actor — machines, software, people and third parties. For the AI already in your stack, it is an agentic runtime with absolute guardrails and a flat, predictable cost curve.

- **Every party is an actor.** A carrier, a broker, a crew or a yard joins the network as a node — through an interface, a system or a person on a phone.
- **Reliable rather than merely plausible.** Workflows compile into goal trees that run the same way every time.
- **People stay in charge.** Genuine edge cases go to the right person with the options already worked out.

## A vessel arrival, orchestrated end to end

Terminal workflows — vessel arrival, container off-load, equipment scheduling — compile into goal trees that run the same way every time, at a small fraction of the cost of asking a language model to reason from scratch. You don't want a system to improvise a container off-load. When reality diverges from the plan, the decision goes to a terminal operator, the plan updates, and the network learns from the answer.

An example goal tree (illustrative scenario):

1. **Vessel arriving** — estimated arrival 04:30.
2. **Berth assigned** — berth 3, no waiting at anchor.
3. **Cranes scheduled** — two quay cranes, carriers staged.
4. **Refrigerated container misplaced — escalated to a person (human in the loop).** The operator confirms a new yard slot and the plan updates.
5. **Truck and rail notified** — pickup windows pushed downstream.
6. **Container cleared** — less time in the yard.

## One plan across every hand-off

The same pattern applies wherever a prediction has to turn into coordinated action by several companies at once (illustrative scenarios):

- **Customs — the documentation exception, resolved before the container lands.** A missing or inconsistent document is predicted days out. The broker, the carrier and the consignee each receive the action that is theirs, and the exception is closed while the box is still at sea.
- **Cold chain — a temperature alert becomes a re-route.** A shipment starts to drift out of range. The network re-routes it, books re-icing and hands it to the next carrier as one plan, instead of a chain of phone calls after the product is already lost.
- **Aircraft on ground — the part, the technicians and the crew hotel as one plan.** When an aircraft is grounded for a part, one goal tree moves the part, the technicians and the crew's hotel together, so they converge on the same day.
- **Inland water — barge schedules that respect the tide.** Barge movements limited by tide and berth availability re-plan automatically when either one moves, and every downstream pickup is told in the same step.

## Forward and reverse: getting things back is logistics too

Reverse logistics — getting unwanted things out of homes and back into circulation — is a thousand small plans that change constantly. Every pickup is a decision across a giver, a host with a schedule, a van with finite capacity, a listing and eventually a buyer.

The host cancels, the buyer reschedules, the van fills up — the tree re-plans around it in milliseconds and nobody is called.

Video: [Building resilient air freight with goal tree logic](https://youtu.be/T-hD1QrxcCE) (January 2026) — how a goal tree keeps an air-freight plan on track when one leg of it changes.

## Crawl, walk, run

The network deploys as shadow infrastructure alongside your existing terminal, transport and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems the entire way — no downtime, no rip-and-replace.

- **Crawl:** a proof of concept at a single site, working with the processes and paperwork already in place. One workflow, run in the shadow of today's systems until it earns trust.
- **Walk:** more sites, then the long tail — smaller terminals, equipment providers and transport companies join as nodes, through interfaces where they exist and through people where they don't.
- **Run:** with nodes deployed out to the long tail, the whole network becomes more resilient and responsive. Each new participant makes every plan on it easier to keep.

## Bring order to the hand-offs

Travel is Otonoma's lead market. In logistics, the work to date is modelled and simulated — and we are looking for the operators who want to take it further with us.

- [Request a demo](https://www.otonoma.com/demo-request)
- [Other use cases](https://www.otonoma.com/use-cases)