Project Summary

Waterway transportation emits three times less C02 than road transport. Transport by barge is predominantly used for big-volumes, as a barge replace a lot of trucks. ST4W aims to convince shippers shipping palletized freight to ship road freight by water. These flows are often small and highly diversified volumes, loaded, transported and delivered mainly by SMEs, with complex distribution schemes. Pallet flows, loaded directly in barges or bundled in containers, need to be consolidated for shipment by water. Effective logistics engineering is essential to ensure cargo consolidation, requiring an accurate synchronisation between operators and a collaborative approach demanding organisational and behavioural change from logistics professionals. Efficient, simple and low-cost communications tools, using worldwide standards are indispensable.


At present, there are no dedicated tools for waterway transportation, and maritime systems are too expensive for SMEs. This is a critical issue, especially as 85 % of European river freight is concentrated in NWE territory. Consequently ST4W proposes a management solution for shipment by inland waterway transport, providing to small stakeholders a simpler and cheaper access to secure data, and enabling them to share a hierarchical track & trace service of shipment, complementing the River Information Services, which localizes vessels. These tools will be tested, validated and rolled out during the project with the support of various partners (shippers, logistics operators, ship owners, ports and terminals, waterway administrations). A sustainable and closer cooperation between waterway actors and their supply chain partners will enable more clients to make use of waterway transportation (from mental shift to modal shift), and consequently to reduce CO2 emissions of their logistics operations: We forecast a modal transfer of 600 millions t.km from road to waterway, namely 40 000 T of CO2 saved by the tenth year after the project.

Project Partners

Lead partner

Organisation Contact name Address Email
Multitel Stéphane Deketelaere 2 Rue Pierre et Marie Curie
Mons
7000
Belgium 		deketelaere@multitel.be
Name Contact Name Email Country
CRITT T&L Claire Bouvier claire.bouvier@critt-tl.fr France
Logistics in Wallonia Bernard Piette bpi@logisticsinwallonia.be Belgium
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven Tom Van Woensel t.v.woensel@tue.nl Netherlands
Stichting Bureau Telematica Binnenvaart Henk van Laar henkvanlaar@binnenvaart.org Netherlands
Institut du droit international des transports Ludovic Couturier lcouturier@idit.asso.fr France
Stichting Projecten Binnenvaart Khalid Tachi k.tachi@eicb.nl Netherlands
Port Autonome du Centre et de l'Ouest Catherine Maheux c.maheux@le-paco.be Belgium
Port de Bruxelles - Haven van Brussel Désirée Simonetti dsimonetti@port.brussels Belgium
Universität Duisburg-Essen (UDE) Bernd Noche bernd.noche@uni-due.de Germany
Blue Line Logistics nv Antoon Van Coillie antoon.vancoillie@bluelinelogistics.eu Belgium
Inlecom System Ltd Yash Chadha yash@inlecom.com United Kingdom
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