Business and Environmentally Sustainable Freight transport enabled by Intelligent and Collaborative Operations

Freight transport is the lifeblood of the global economy and plays an essential role in global social and economic prosperity. Due to the inherent complexity and collaborative nature, efficient and cost-effective freight transport requires close collaboration and data sharing across the entire logistics network. However, only limited amounts of data and information are practically shared among involved stakeholders because of the functional silos existing in global logistics networks and actual operational practices, which adds unnecessary complexities and uncertainties to the already highly complex and uncertain operating environments. This is especially true for seaports as the critical nodes and bottlenecks of the logistics networks. Lack of holistic considerations and collaborations has been the major cause for the inefficiencies of global port operations. This paper exemplifies a cross-border joint innovation action between Finland and China and presents a federated operation intelligence framework tailored to address the specific challenges and need faced in the siloed but highly-clustered multimodal operational environment, thus enabling and enhancing the data-centric collaboration and cloud-based orchestration among involved stakeholders for business and environmentally sustainable freight transport across ports and wider logistics networks.