A Door-to-Door Combined Transport Planner

Establishing a web-based portal functioning as a one-stop-shop for transport buyers is a radical idea of a consumer oriented intermodal freight system. This utopian vision will be materialized in a system description and a prototype of a Door-to-Door Combined Trans-port Planner (COTRAP), developed to fulfill the requirements of potential customers and in interaction with customers, shippers, rail and road freight operators, rail infrastructure owners and other actors in the intermodal freight system. Conversely, successive versions of the COTRAP will be used as an instrument to identify intra- and inter-organizational barriers to the establishment of a competitive and effective combined transport system with rail freight operators as the intermodal integrator. In this paper we describes the ideas and methodology behind the project, as well as some preliminary results.