A Digital Decision Support Tool to Encourage Intermodal Freight Transport-Methodology and Strategic Usability

The transport sector remains a major contributor to CO2 emissions in Europe, necessitating innovative solutions to decarbonize freight logistics. Although technological and organizational solutions, such as smart containers, digital platforms, standardized equipment, predictive analytics, or alternative fuels, exist, customers still hesitate to adopt intermodal transport. This reluctance is driven by barriers such as operational complexity and reliability concerns, limited rail infrastructure and terminal capacity, economic uncertainties, and fragmented digital integration.
To encourage a further modal shift and force intermodal transport as a sustainable alternative to traditional unimodal trucking throughout Europe, a digital decision support tool was developed in the Austrian lighthouse project “PhysICAL”. The core contribution is the imTraUm platform, a user-friendly, web-based strategic tool that enables decision-makers to input real transport demands and receive a comparative analysis of unimodal versus intermodal transport options. KPIs, such as transport prices, CO2 emissions, transport time, distance and a newly introduced ecoscore, which incorporates CO2, noise, and light emissions, are used to assess and visualize the environmental and economic impacts of both transport options. The tool illustrates that collaborative intermodal solutions can deliver tangible environmental and economic benefits, highlighting the potential of digital tools and the Physical Internet to support a more sustainable, efficient, and transparent European freight transport system.