The efficient movement of freight trucks is vital for modern logistics, where the organization of truck tours is central to optimizing supply chain operations and minimizing transportation costs. The truck tour patterns embody a complex interplay of diverse decision-making factors, reflecting the effectiveness of transport and logistics planning initiatives. Despite previous research efforts, an in-depth analysis of understanding how various decision-making factors, such as time of the day and product type, interact and their heterogeneous effects on shaping truck tour patterns is still lacking. This limitation hinders the development of more effective and sustainable strategies for freight transportation. In this paper, by leveraging large-scale carrier and shipment dataset in the Netherlands, we capture and analyze the heterogeneity of over 1000 diverse tour patterns of freight trucks in terms of temporal, spatial, and shipment requirements characteristics. We further introduce a novel modeling approach using random parameters logit models with heterogeneity in means and variances to uncover the heterogeneous effects of various factors on the choice of truck tour patterns. The model results highlight the multifaceted nature of truck travel behaviors, offering practical implications for logistics operations, policy development and freight planning.

In the current omni-channel retail context, end consumers can choose between many delivery channels, including crowdshipping, delivery to parked car (into trunk), autonomous delivery robots, autonomous parcel lockers or staffed pickup points, and the retail outlet itself. The resulting changes in urban freight movements are attracting increasing interest, as these have a direct impact on the sustainability and liveability of the city. The identification of the advantages and disadvantages of delivery channels from the perspective of different stakeholders is essential to design a delivery network that is valued by all stakeholders, including transport operators, end consumers and local authorities. This overview can be a valuable support for city planners when designing sustainable delivery scenarios.

To support a modal shift toward sustainable freight solutions, such as inland waterway transport (IWT), researchers and practitioners require long-term historical data on IWT freight flows. However, such comprehensive time series have been unavailable until now. This study addresses this gap by presenting a harmonized dataset encompassing 50 years (1970–2023) of IWT freight data across Europe, with a focus on the Rhine-Alpine Corridor. The dataset includes transport volumes (in tonnes) and transport performance (in ton-kilometers), classified according to NST-R, NST2007, and CCR nomenclatures. To ensure data continuity and completeness, processing techniques—including imputation and optical character recognition—were applied. The dataset offers valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and transport planners aiming to comprehend and enhance the role of IWT in Europe’s freight transport landscape.

Purpose – This study aims to examine how coercive, legitimate, expert, referent and reward power shape compliance, satisfaction and collaboration in innovation-intensive semiconductor B2B dyads. The authors map bilateral power-pairings and develop a dyadic power-pairing viability (DPPV) framework explaining which pairings persist without sustained satisfaction loss and why others do not.

Design/methodology/approach – This study used qualitative multiple-case study of 22 Dutch customer–supplier dyads. The authors code each side’s use of the five power bases, derive pairings, link them to outcomes and use cross-case pattern matching and negative-case analysis to elaborate DPPV and derive testable propositions. 

Findings – Only 9/25 theoretical pairings appear; the dominant configuration is {Customer-Legitimate, Supplier-Expert}. Coercive buys short-term compliance but depresses satisfaction. Expert and referent underpin durable collaboration when aligned to partner needs. Legitimate coordinates under clear roles. Reward works when value and fairness are credible. Viability is shaped by IP risk, time-to-market pressure and capability asymmetries.

Research limitations/implications – Single sector, The Netherlands; qualitative design limits generalizability. Future work should test DPPV quantitatively/longitudinally, probe boundary conditions across sectors/cultures and model dynamic switching between pairings under shocks.

Practical implications – This study avoids prolonged coercive use, aligns expert/referent to the locus of capability, uses legitimate with explicit roles/decision rights, applies reward with transparent value sharing, combines bases across the dyad (e.g. {Customer-Legitimate, Supplier-Expert}) and mitigates IP exposure, speed pressures and asymmetries.

Originality/value – This study introduces a dyadic, configuration-level view of power (DPPV) that explains observed vs absent power-pairings, links them to compliance-satisfaction trade-offs and tailors power use to semiconductor contexts, extending power-base theory to high-tech B2B governance.

Improving connectivity between ports and the hinterlands they serve is critical for reliable and cost-efficient freight transport. However, overreliance on a single port, or small subset of ports, can cause economic losses when those ports fail, given limited redundancies of port-hinterland systems. However, planners often lack critical insights into port-hinterland redundancy. Here, we analyse the port-hinterland redundancies across Africa, a continent with a small number of gateway ports serving large hinterlands and large investment need in the coming decades, providing a window of opportunity to embed redundancy in strategic transport investments. We find that regions with high accessibility, in particular coastal cities close to a major seaport (e.g., Namibia, Senegal, Kenya) have low redundancy. In contrast, some landlocked hinterlands (e.g., Zambia, Zimbabwe, Niger, and Chad) have low accessibility, yet high redundancies given their reliance on different port ranges. We further show that new transport investments aimed at improving accessibility can create both synergies and trade-offs with system redundancy. Port terminal expansions, in particular, can reduce the redundancy of the core hinterland while improving the redundancy of the hinterland periphery. Rail connections can improve access to a wider set of ports at a comparable cost but can also reinforce the dependency on a single cost-efficient rail connection. Analysing redundancies of port hinterlands can support strategic planning of regional investments and help improve the resilience of the regional and continental transport system against disruptions.

The existence of time-bound targets for decarbonization of freight transport raises the need for knowledge of the dynamic behavior of the system. However, little is known about the factors that determine these dynamics, conceptually and empirically. We argue that research is needed to allow substantiated claims about the feasibility of decarbonization policies. We propose a transition theory-inspired framing of the problem, which considers the dynamics of new technologies as alternatives to the established markets, institutions and regulations. We review the relevant freight modeling research literature and develop recommendations for research. While the literature does contain a small set of studies that address the dynamic behavior of the freight system, the relevant phenomena are only partially considered and empirical evidence is scant. We recommend the use of a multi-level dynamic perspective, which includes a long-term view beyond the time horizons considered today. Most importantly, new empirical modeling work is needed to develop valid dynamic models of the relevant decisions taken by all freight transport system stakeholders.

Nowadays, e-commerce is gaining popularity worldwide. End consumers are shifting from in-store shopping to online due to the numerous advantages. The e-deliveries are associated with smaller and more frequent deliveries, failed and geographically sprawled ones. It causes the increase of the number of vehicles as well as of the kilometres travelled, and then the raise of the negative impacts, e.g., pollutant emissions, congestions. Therefore, new delivery channels have been developed to optimise the delivery system and new procedures are necessary for their assessment. A key role in these assessment procedures is played by the analysis of how each of the new delivery omni-channels are really chosen by end consumers. Then, this study points out end consumers’ choices through a structured survey. The data collected are then analysed through a clustering approach. The aim is to find out the decision processes by comparing various delivery channels based on service attributes (e.g., delivery time and price, the place where the item is received), respondents’ characteristics and choices made. The results show that such an analysis could be a powerful tool for forecasting end consumers’ decisions, which should be taken into consideration when designing new city logistics scenarios.

Teleoperated driving complements automated driving and acts as transitional technology towards full automation. An economic advantage of teleoperated driving in logistics operations lies in managing fleets with fewer teleoperators compared to vehicles with in-vehicle drivers. This alleviates growing truck driver shortage problems in the logistics industry and save costs. However, a trade-off exists between the teleoperator-to-vehicle (TO/V) ratio and the service level of teleoperation. This study designs a simulation framework to explore this trade-off generating multiple performance indicators as proxies for teleoperation service level. By applying the framework, we identify factors influencing the trade-off and optimal TO/V ratios under different scenarios. Our case study on road freight tours in the Netherlands reveals that for any operational settings, a TO/V ratio below one can manage all freight truck tours without delay, while one represents the current situation. The minimum TO/V ratio for zero-delay operations is never above 0.6, implying a minimum of 40% teleoperation labor cost saving. For operations where a small delay is allowed, TO/V ratios as low as 0.4 are shown to be feasible, which indicates potential savings of up to 60%. This confirms great promise for a positive business case for the teleoperated driving as a service.

Alignment of core supply chain functions with corporate supply chain strategy is a key success factor for firms. Misalignments can lead to inefficiencies, higher costs, risks, and weaker performance. In particular, misalignment between transportation strategy and supply chain strategy can reduce responsiveness and flexibility, increase risks, and amplify environmental impacts. Although classic supply chain frameworks established the theoretical foundations of supply chain strategy, they treated transportation as a secondary issue and overlooked contextual decision factors such as product density, perishability, product life cycle, resilience, and sustainability. Consequently, a conceptual model that systematically integrates the complexity of the transportation and supply chain strategy alignment is not yet present in the literature. To address this gap, we develop a conceptual framework that introduces four transportation strategies, i.e. Cost-Oriented, Flexibility-Reliant, Modal-Control-Intensive, and Value-Enhanced, mapped against supply chain strategies across thirteen contextual criteria. Using the Best-Worst Method, we supplement the framework with an illustrative survey study of Global Fortune 500 companies. The results indicate that no single transportation strategy is right across all supply chains, but tailor-made service bundles can lead to alignment. Our study extends alignment theory to transportation and offers practical insights for managers of shipper firms and logistics service providers.

Diesel-powered trucks handle most container movement between ports and the hinterland, resulting in negative externalities. Using low-emission trucks could reduce the impact of hinterland transport on global warming, but widespread diffusion remains slow. Since ports are central hubs for hinterland transport and focal points in the energy transition, we assess the conditions at ports for accelerating the transition to low-emission trucks. We employ a multi-system transition lens to examine the technology, actor, and institutional couplings between the hinterland transport system and the port energy system, under the regulatory influence of the port authority and EU policies. Drawing on data from a literature review, our findings show that ports offer 9 distinct conditions to accelerate the uptake of low-emission trucks for hinterland transport, including facilitating the diffusion of niche-technologies across systems, coordinating actors involved in energy infrastructure for low-emission trucks, and governing the transition as a focal institutional body in hinterland transport chains. Future research should incorporate primary data from port hinterland transport actors to examine diffusion barriers and deploy simulations to understand the diffusion of low-emission trucks in port hinterlands under different policy scenarios.

E-commerce is rapidly changing the behaviour of end consumers for purchasing and receiving e-parcels, leading to a significant increase in home deliveries. This phenomenon results in new challenges for cities such as more frequent, smaller, and failed deliveries and geographical sprawl, increasing traffic impacts, and reduced liveability and sustainability. In the new omnichannel e-retail context, end consumers can choose between several delivery channels, including crowdshipping, delivery to parked cars (into trunk), autonomous delivery robots, autonomous parcel lockers, and staffed pickup points. Each alternative has different implications for end consumers and cities. Although some studies have pointed out how end consumers make choices when faced with new alternatives, several aspects remained unexplored. This paper contributes by investigating end consumers’ preferences for multiple delivery channels through a stated preference survey. Several attributes are considered including destination location, delivery time and price, time windows, data protection, tracking and tracing service, potential damage, payment timeframe, flexibility, and level of sustainability. The findings highlight that end consumers have limited knowledge of new delivery channels and limited willingness to receive e-purchases away from home.

As the rapid growth of urban e-commerce increases the volume of last-mile deliveries, logistics service providers have difficulty in meeting the demand of on-demand consumer requests. This increase in demand challenges traditional delivery, with some parcels becoming disproportionately costly to deliver to their destinations. To address this, we introduce a cost-based outlier parcel selection mechanism that identifies parcels with a high negative impact on the marginal delivery costs. These outlier parcels are then eliminated from their tours and outsourced to a crowdshipping market, where individuals combine the delivery task with their already planned trips. We use unique data on delivery tours of six service providers for the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. The cost-based decision rule for identifying outlier parcels results in a low proportion of outsourcing to the crowdshipping market compared to earlier literature. We identify only about 1 % of the total parcel demand as outliers across all carriers combined. Of these outlier parcels, the proportion selected for crowdshipping based on their cost efficiency ranges from 42.78 % to 3 %, depending on the scenario. While crowdshipping provides a viable solution for handling a small portion of last-mile deliveries, its environmental and economic sustainability is restricted by factors such as compensation rates and the delivery mode used. This study demonstrates that outsourcing high-cost outlier parcels to crowdshipping can be cost-efficient and reduce emissions of last-mile logistics companies; however, the proportion of these parcels is very small, limiting the overall impact on sustainability.

In practice, speed limits on road networks are often determined pragmatically, which can give suboptimal solutions for traffic performance and unfair results for the underlying user classes. This study presents an elegant approach to determine optimal speed limits on a traffic network with asymmetric user classes under congested conditions, that minimizes individual user travel time and does justice to differences in economic importance. Existing prescriptive approaches typically lack one or more of these features, cannot guarantee optimality or are difficult to solve. We formulate a new prescriptive method using mixed-integer quadratic programming. The model can be solved with well-established operation research approaches and commercial solvers such as Cplex or Gurobi. To demonstrate the approach, we apply it to a regional network in the Netherlands. The result shows a reduction of travel time of passenger cars by 6% and of trucks by 13%, with mild changes in speed limits compared to the base situation, of between −20% and +10%. The speed limit changes and impacts are in line with the relatively high economic importance of freight traffic. Also we find in this case that the speed limit changes are ordered by major routes through the network, which makes implementation relatively straightforward.

The e-commerce growth trend has great potential to influence both the nature and the dimension of the challenges policymakers will face in the near future. In this sense, the purchasing habits of the end consumer have undergone a significant change with the development of the emerging information and communication technologies that impact on the purchase behaviour and the way of receiving the item bought. The goal of the paper is thus to analyse cutting-edge last mile delivery alternatives while looking at the characteristics that determine the preferred alternative for receiving e-purchases. The identified new alternatives besides traditional mail are: crowdshipping, delivery to the car trunk, delivery by autonomous delivery robots, unattended parcel locker, attended pick up point and click-and-collect service. The paper presents the methodology for designing and delivering, as well as the findings of a survey carried out for investigating users' behaviour, after reviewing the key attributes and levels that influence end consumers in choosing how to receive their e-purchases.