Business Perspectives for Freight Transportation Management - The SYNCHRO-NET Project

Nowadays, the effects of globalization impacted on the international trade that is growing faster. To confirm this trend, the volume of world trade continued to grow in the 2015, according to the estimates provided by the World Trade Organization. In this context, the challenge for transportation is to overcome the complexities related to higher service quality, time-sensitive delivery, the increasing distances and the vulnerability of the supply chain. To these issues are added those concerning the economical end environmental sustainability of the logistics operations. In fulfillment of the Horizon 2020 programme, different projects and research efforts are addressed to de-stressing the supply chain, introducing ICT-based solutions (e.g., e-Freight tools) and slow steaming concepts. The paper presents the SYNCHRO-modal supply chain eco-NET (SYNCHRO-NET) project, which has the aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of slow streaming combined with the synchro-modality, to reduce the externalities of the supply chain (i.e., costs and emissions) and to improve the reliability, the sustainability and the optimization planning process. This project takes into account the results obtained by the previous successful projects in the same field, but introduces a further layer of innovation that extends the current state-of-theart. In fact, the SYNCHRO-NET implementation is not strictly focused on the ICT solution, but it combines operational models with a business perspective and includes a stakeholderdriven approach.