Towards Rail-Road Online Exchange Platforms in EU-Freight Transportation Markets: An Analysis of Matching Supply and Demand in Multimodal Services

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is confronted with too low a share of inland rail freight transport. The implementation of two-sided online exchanges for rail-road freight transport could increase this share. However, such exchanges focusing on the EU market are mainly designed for single modes of transport. Their matching of supply and demand for multimodal services, especially including rail, is still in its infancy. This paper applies a maturity growth framework to speed up the implementation of such multimodal online exchanges. The framework integrates insights from industrial organization theory, platform economy theory, and maturity growth theory. Online exchanges, summarized in a new taxonomy, are compared to study their practices on matching supply with demand on the exchange, especially for multimodal services. Data is collected from case studies, exchange websites and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows the emergence of new market actors and business models, including digital freight forwarders. These offer a variety of transport mode solutions for EU inland and EU related global freight transport. Maturity in matching supply and demand appears to result from clear objectives to provide benefits to the exchange participants, notably by digitizing the data for transaction completion and providing real time support for operational issues. In this context of rising online exchanges, especially in road and global multimodal transport (air, ocean, and road), the competition to capture a fragmented freight market seems to steadily increase. A similar maturity analysis of exchanges could not be found.