The Port of Rotterdam is one of the busiest in the world, currently ranking number 1 in Europe and number 4 in the world; shipping almost 400 million metric tonnes of cargo per year. However, there is not a lot of physical space in the Rotterdam area to allow further growth. The port will thus have to seek other means of improving, to allow for economic expansion.

With SUPPORT, Almende proposes that efficiency of the logistics network surrounding the port can be increased, if different parties would communicate more and would coordinate their efforts better. The project aims at developing an ICT solution for supporting and strengthening logistics networks. The Port of Rotterdam will serve as a real-life testing ground.
Central to the project is the idea of treating the collection of logistics partners as a network, rather than a chain. If an event causes a disturbance – a container is delayed through customs, a truck driver falls ill – this should not be seen as a broken link that ruins the entire chain, but as a piece of information that can be communicated through the network, so other parties might respond to it.
The project will finally deliver a system which can coordinate the logistic activities of multiple partners: the container terminal, truckers, etc. SUPPORT connects the parties and enables communication between them to allow quick response to incidents.
Important is that each party will still be autonomous, and controls its own activities. But by using available information – for instance a trucker's ETA – each party can continuously adapt its own schedule. The project partners will take care to safe-guard against sharing privacy-sensitive information – only data that are necessary to allow other parties to optimize their planning will be communicated.