A comprehensive transport system is a major backbone for economic prosperity and growth. The transport sector is both, intrinsically tied to almost every economic activity in a work-sharing economy (planned and conducted by logistics) and an important industry of its own. The transport sector is linked with the economic system in manifold manners and therefore is a significant factor for economic system’s future quality in terms of sustainable development (i.e. the functional interplay of economic, socio-cultural and environmental aspects). Transport’s efficiency is largely determined by intelligent logistics, defined as the integrated planning, operations management and controlling of the dynamic flows of goods, passengers, energy and information, as well as the effective implementation of modern and in some respect alternative technologies - related (e.g.) to the use of renewable energy.
In comparison to passenger transport, freight transport and business related transport activities in general are expected to grow about 4 times larger in the upcoming years. The resulting problems form a complex nexus of interrelated aspects to be addressed in up to date research driven transport policies. Some highlighted aspects of these problems are mentioned briefly here:
1. Because they operate on the basis of the more or less some infrastructure including the use of the same technological systems freight transport is forming bottlenecks for passenger mobility needs, especially in urban agglomerations.
2. The expected increase of freight transport of about 70 percent in the EU within the next decades is decoupled from the growth of economic productivity, widely exceeds the capacities of the infrastructure and will at the same time foil every effort to reduce greenhouse gas emission and energy consumption in the transport sector.
3. Although economic growth is still a commonly accepted desired goal of our society, the resulting transport activities based on the underlying economic prosperity requires to form up a stress factor for social and ecological life quality, particularly in border or urban regions where traffic concentrates.
4. This effect comes up even stronger because within the EU the modal split has undergone a rapid shift from railway or waterborne transport to dominant road transport, which assimilated the utmost increases of demand for transport since the early 70s in the western member states and after 1990 in the eastern member states as well.
5. While the increase of transported goods stayed on a relatively moderate level the transport distances of the transported goods firmly exploded for various and well investigated structural reasons in the globalized production and consumption networks.
6. Over the past years transport has already become more expensive and its cost are expected to increase dramatically within the next years because of increasing prices for energy and the inevitably necessary internalisation of external costs of traffic systems’ impacts on the interrelated systems (environmental and social systems).
7. Due to the continuously increasing individualisation of customer requirements, resulting in rising product variety as well as delivery type and speed, complex flows of goods, materials and persons are often still based on inefficient logistics systems.
8. Many items of the logistics system still remain on an inefficient level with respect to the way of combination of transport modes, the capacity usage of these modes as well as their performance management system.
Solutions in terms of “sustainable transport” are required to address the complexity of these briefly described problems and their interrelations. Sustainable transport in this respect goes beyond the minimisation of ecological impacts (“greening”) and the technological innovation of transport means and infrastructure. Simultaneously, it has to integrate aspects of social systems (contributing to transport efficiency in terms of education, training and competence acquisition, and/or in terms of stressing traffic impacts on e.g. health and life quality in urban areas), consumer integration (as a major driver of demand and characteristics of transportation services) and new economic challenges/opportunities, e.g. in upcoming markets of the future.
Utmost important, transportation depends on the logistics systems that determine its emergence, performance and efficiency. To avoid shortcomings within the necessary change management of transport operations, the underlying logistics system has to be addressed explicitly. Within the last decades, logistics’ role has shifted from solely providing transportation services to more or less comprehensive planning and executing of complex production, distribution and recycling operations in company networks while using modern IT technologies as well as advanced quantitative and qualitative planning and management methods in the context of Supply Chain Management (SCM). In consequence, logistics has successfully undergone a paradigm shift from the classical triple of transport, stocking and turnover to a key instance of the socio-economic system.
Alliances between science and companies as well as public authorities do benefit from cooperation through fostering and focussing flow of research, innovation implementation and dynamic improvement in that area. Success factors are manifold: they may include ICT, new planning and management algorithms and software development as well as their implementation in intelligent service-oriented software architectures (SoA) in “future internet” settings, highly versatile logistics infrastructures, the integration of methods derived from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental Management/Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) strategies, as well as all levels of knowledge transfer, training and competence development.
Basically, we face an intensive interdependency between technological and operational innovations for the modes of transport, the frameworks (structural, economical, conceptual) and markets in which they interact. The conceptual frames of the underlying determining logistics system represent the prerequisites for a desired transformation of the transport sector into zero or low carbon transport systems in which technical options are efficiently used with the maximum possible economical, societal and ecological benefit.
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