The book focuses on the context of social and political keitsdiskussion sustainability and the growing difficulties in road freight with the question of how rail services can be practically integrated into the value network of industrial and commercial enterprises. The integration of the material and information flows to the large number of legally independent actors is the focus.​

Intermodal Freight Transportation conceptualizes intermodal transport as a set of physical, logical, financial and contractual flows, examining the barriers that impact intermodal freight services and the resulting performance variables. The book covers transport modes, agents, supply and demand patterns, key drivers, trends influencing the freight transportation sector, the evolution of supply and logistics chains, and the impacts of technological advancements, such as autonomous vehicles and e-commerce. In addition, the book covers transport agents, such as shippers, freight forwarders, integrators, and customs, as well as the demand for freight transport services and the key properties of goods. Readers will find a variety of new tools for analyzing and building effective transport chains that addresses component technology, information, responsibility, and financing dimension, along with sections on key organizational, regulatory, infrastructure and technological barriers. The book concludes with a look into the future of the freight transport sector.

This book deals with the electronic procurement of transportation services. It provides an overview of the fundamentals for the procurement of transportation services, including the relevant objectives, involved parties, and processes. A focus is set on Electronic Transportation Marketplaces (ETMs) which offer main functionalities for the procurement of transportation services on the spot and contract market as well as additional functionalities to improve further processes (e.g., time-slot management). Even though such marketplaces are important from an economic and ecological perspective, previous research provides only little knowledge about the status quo of their use, the determinants of marketplace use and the link between this use and business value. To close these research gaps, Philipp Sylla builds a comprehensive conceptual research framework and conducts an empirical analysis based on a web survey of shippers in Germany. The empirical results build the foundation for the development of an evaluation concept that provides practical support for shippers in the assessment of marketplace use and the evaluation of potential business value impacts.

Management of logistics distribution networks is a challenging task. Decision-makers rely on logistics assistance systems that recommend actions to optimise the networks. These systems can be based on simheuristics to benefit from metaheuristics in exploring possible solutions and on simulation for modelling the networks. This book presents three approaches to recommend promising solutions to optimise the networks with fewer simulation runs. The first approach utilises information from the network to guide the search of metaheuristics. In this approach, domain-specific information is defined and assigned to actions. The metaheuristic algorithm utilises this domain-specific information to find more-promising solutions. The second approach is reducing the number of possible solutions by grouping actions with respect to their domain-specific attributes. Here, the smaller solution space decreases the number of required simulation runs. The last approach looks for equivalent solutions that cause the same changes in the network. This approach aims to skip unnecessary evaluations and, thus, simulation effort.

While the operational realities of intermodal transport are relatively well known, the institutional challenges are less well understood. This book provides an overview of intermodal transport and logistics including the policy background, emerging industry trends and academic approaches. Establishing the three key features of intermodal transport geography as intermodal terminals, inland logistics and hinterland corridors, Jason Monios takes an institutional approach to understanding the difficulties of successful intermodal transport and logistics. Key areas of investigation include the policy and planning background, the roles of public and private stakeholders and the identification of emerging strategy conflicts. Substantial empirical content situates the theoretical and practical issues in real-world examples via three detailed case study chapters (covering the USA, UK and Europe), making the book useful to students as well as practitioners desiring an understanding of how intermodal transport and logistics work in practice. The identified challenges to intermodal transport and logistics are used to demonstrate how competing port and inland strategies can inhibit the necessary processes of integration required to underpin successful intermodal transport. The book concludes with a look at the future of institutional adaptation that may enhance the capacity of freight actors to engage with intermodal transport developments.

Rapid globalisation has led to the realization that the traditional modal approach to transporting people and goods is insufficient. Multimodal Transport Security illustrates the inevitable shift towards multimodal transportation systems, further enabled by modern technological innovations, and succinctly assesses the demanding and new security challenges that have accompanied this. The emergence of these complex transportation infrastructures has created exceedingly attractive terrorist targets owing to the potential for wide-scale disruption of global supply chains. Providing a conjoint analysis of key issues in both passenger and freight multimodal transportation security, expert contributors provide pivotal case studies highlighting the successes and failures of various policies and practices across several geographical regions. Adeptly drawing these strands together, the editors identify similarities and heterogeneities and in doing so, produce a practical illustration of the potential for further enhancement of multimodal security. An ever-increasing and worldwide concern with the improvement of security in transport places this unique and comprehensive text at the forefront of transportation literature. It will be of great value to students and scholars of public policy as well as policy makers in the fields of transportation and counter-terrorism.

This book discusses the critical contemporary issues of sustainability and integration of physical and information flow. It explores the digitalization of logistics processes and the need for a more integrated and a seamless cooperation in supply chain management, which are dominant trends in business practice. Moreover, it examines how the pressure for CO2 emission reductions and more resource- efficient business models influences the organization of logistics operations on both a local and global scale, demonstrating that integrating physical and cyber systems is necessary to achieve a more environmentally friendly, safe logistics and supply chain operations. In the individual chapters, the authors discuss the new qualitative and quantitative theoretical methods and models and also analyze case studies from business practice. This book provides valuable insights for academics, Ph.D. students and practitioners wishing to deepen their understanding of logistics operations and management.