Collaborative Planning and Synchromodal Transport: towards a research agenda for the SELIS project

Policymakers and shippers are asking for a container transport with lower levels of Green House Gases emissions, lower energy consumption and improved quality. At the same time, stakeholders and carriers are looking for a more reliable transport system and an improved utilization of their assets. As candidate solutions to improve containerized freight transport in its costs and reliability, collaborative planning and synchromodal transport are proposed within the SELIS project. Synchromodal transport is a novel concept, originated in the hinterland container transport, prescribing an adaptive planning approach that takes advantage of updated information on the transport network and the synchronization of transport demand with supply. In this work, we consider the planning of synchromodal transport in a collaborative environment where costs and reliability are the two performance measures to be examined. Our work opens a research direction that takes into account both the current practice and the state of the academic knowledge to foster practice adoption of synchromodality. This research direction is presented here and detailed out as one of the research agendas of the SELIS project.