Elevating the logistics resilience of the Rhine-Alpine Corridor with the help of innovative vessel and cargo handling concepts

Abstract

The Rhine-Alpine Corridor connects 70 million inhabitants and is home to Europe's biggest sea and inland ports and the Rhine as its most important waterway. Recent developments and events, such as the extreme low-water period in 2018 and the aggravating barge congestion in the seaports, have deteriorated the trust in the inland waterway network capacity of the Corridor. Hence, the availability and trustworthiness of IWT as a reliable transport mode is diminishing – possibly endangering the ambitious modal shift goals. In order to elevate logistics resilience, the challenges of low-water navigability and barge congestion are to be tackled with new solutions from naval architecture and marine engineering, i. e. innovative vessel concepts to ensure low-water navigability on the Rhine and a modular mobile terminal for additional transhipment capacity in the ports. The resulting concepts will be further examined regarding their operational verification and economic validation before being developed and deployed in their real settings.