Abstract
Inland waterway transport (IWT) offers substantial potential for sustainable freight movement by minimizing external costs such as emissions. In Europe, the Rhine-Alpine Corridor (RALP) stands out as a key network, linking multiple countries and handling significant cargo volumes. Despite policy targets aimed at increasing IWT's share in long-distance freight, recent years have seen a decline in inland waterway usage, largely attributed to various disruptions.
These disruptions range from extreme weather conditions—leading to critical water levels that impede navigability—to operational inefficiencies, strikes, economic crises, and global shocks such as pandemics. Current research highlights that the structure of transport networks profoundly influences resilience, yet most studies in IWT focus narrowly on one dimension of disruptions, often ignoring spatial or connectivity factors. Furthermore, while some works have demonstrated that container shipping networks can maintain functionality through effective responses, evidence on similar resilience strategies in the European inland context is limited.
To address these gaps, this project aims to disentangle the temporal, spatial, and connectivity dynamics of disruption impacts on container IWT in the RALP. By applying methods including spatial and time-series econometrics, network analysis, and simulation, the project will quantify how shocks affect performance, examine potential mitigation strategies and evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions. Ultimately, these insights seek to strengthen IWT's role in a greener, more resilient European transport system.
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