Ilog Inc., a developer of business-rules-management software, will roll out transportation-planning software next week. The company on April 11 is scheduled to introduce Ilog Transport PowerOps, software to help shippers consolidate shipping logistics decisions such as carrier selection and scheduling into one application.

Chris Hane, senior product manager at Ilog, says the application is aimed at third-party logistics providers, retailers, and consumer packaged-goods manufacturers.

Ilog provides premade optimization software components to the transportation-management systems market. Ilog's components are used by software developers and businesses to simplify application development in areas such as resource optimization, business logic, and data services. Ilog's optimization and visualization modules are used in customer-relationship-management, supply-chain-management, and enterprise-resource-planning applications.

Ilog has combined three of the company's core technologies--visualization, business-rules management, and resource optimization--into the core of Transport PowerOps, Hane says. As a result, the application will be able to help customers interactively visualize the location of their transportation assets, change shipping demand parameters, and balance service levels against cost and shipping asset utilization.

The software could be well received by midsize companies because only about 20% of them have invested in automated transportation logistic applications, says Greg Aimi, research director of supply-chain technology at AMR Research. He says businesses are trying to find better ways to manage transportation costs as rising fuel prices and a shortage of drivers put a dent in many budgets.