To achieve
socio-economic and environmental sustainability, utilization of existing
capacities and assets has become a key challenge for the transportation sector.
New concepts such as the Physical Internet and synchromodality offer an
alternative to the current “business as usual” setting of freight transport
services. In this paper, we thus start by conceptualizing the Physical Internet
(PI) and synchromodal transport where we examine the state-of-the-art models
together with their designs and methodologies proposed in the scientific
literature. This is to assess and explore possible correlations between these
two concepts to understand how they can reinforce each other. The assessment
results in a more unified vision of the freight transport research. The focus
of our second objective is on synchromodality, where we translate the PI
methodological approaches into a new conceptual framework for synchromodal
transport modelling. Given the analytical nature of all synchromodal transport
models, the authors intend to induce a paradigm shift; a different way of
thinking about the modelling philosophy related to synchromodality. The
underlying elements of our approach are multi-agent technology and GIS.