Inland waterway transport visibility : an enabler for synchromodal transport in Europe

Abstract

European inland waterway transport is often praised for its competitive costs, capacity, and smaller environmental footprint compared to road or rail, yet its share of freight has continued to decline over the past decade. Part of the problem from an operational perspective lies in infrastructure constraints, such as bridge clearances, water level fluctuations that force vessels to reduce their loads and increase costs, and disruptive waterway events, such as congestion, obstructions or lock malfunctions, that are reported but rarely structured into usable operational information. An equally important barrier is harder to pin down: the lack of impact evaluation and real-time visibility into these conditions, shared among shippers, logistics service providers, and terminals. Without this visibility, it is difficult for stakeholders to detect operational challenges early enough to mitigate or respond to transport disruptions, and shifting cargo to another mode in real time when conditions deteriorate, the core idea behind synchromodal transport, becomes much harder to achieve. This thesis proposes visibility as the enabler of synchromodality, given how heavily this concept relies on timely access to information, and delivers it through four connected contributions. First, a federated data space lets transport stakeholders exchange operational information while keeping control and ownership over their data. Second, a set of methods extracts and structures waterway events and vessel-tracking data into predictive features. Third, the information exchanged through the data space is operationalized through machine learning models for travel-time and ETA estimation and transport simulation services, showing that this visibility allows operators to detect delays earlier and decide when to dynamically transship cargo to another available mode, enabling synchromodal transport in practice. Finally, business model principles help identify how value can be created and shared among data space participants, laying the groundwork for a commercially sustainable data space. Tested on the Rhine-Alpine-Danube corridors, some of Europe’s busiest waterways, this dissertation shows how visibility can turn inland barging into a more competitive and flexible part of Europe’s transport system.