Transporting goods via inland waterways offers significant advantages over transport via road or rail. The inland waterway vessel is more environmentally friendly, reliable, and quieter than other transport modalities. This paper presents a framework based on this motivation to develop so-called MicroPorts to strengthen inland waterway transport and increase its attractiveness. MicroPorts are new small-scale transshipment facilities for inland waterways based on the conversion of existing infrastructure. Through this, the network of transshipment points on inland waterways can be expanded while keeping construction costs and impact on nature low and the transported goods closer to their destination, shortening the last few kilometers by road or rail. The MicroPorts framework was developed through several workshops with an inland shipping owner that offers transportation by inland vessels, process analysis at an inland waterway port and literature analyses. It comprises five elements: characteristics, operational requirements, technical requirements, location, and assessment parameters. Based on the framework, a method was derived to develop MicroPorts. The method contains four steps: 1. Identify potential locations, 2. Selection of possible operational concepts, 3. Selection of possible technical implementations, and 4. Evaluation of feasibility. The method can be used for the identification of new transshipment locations and planning of new MicroPorts. This paper also presents first developed MicroPorts concepts alongside an exemplary route.
Framework for the Development of Small Multimodal Inland Waterway Ports for a New Decentralized Inland Port Network
Lect. Notes Logistics
International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics ; 2024 ; Bremen, Germany February 14, 2024 - February 16, 2024
2024-04-03
10 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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