The ecological and digital transition is profoundly transforming the logistics sector. Old polluting trucks make room for new green mobility vehicles, while goods transport services are now managed through open web portals that allow traffic flows and delivery times to be optimised.
The latest innovation in this sense, in Italy, is the EasyRailFreight online platform, designed and created by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (Rfi). The application aims to contribute to the decarbonisation of mobility through the digitalisation of logistics processes, increasingly promoting intermodality of goods transport, i.e. the combined use of different means.
The platform is aimed at railway and road transport companies, terminal operators and in general all operators in the sector and was designed with the idea of encouraging the meeting between supply and demand, facilitating the acquisition of supplementary services and showing the operator a complete overview of the services available on the logistics market.
In a context in which, in the freight transport sector, the demand for services is characterized by greater variability in volumes and an increase in departure and destination locations, the speed of execution of operational processes becomes a determining factor in the value chain .
The presentation
The project was presented last March 26 by the president of Rete Ferroviaria Italiana Dario Lo Bosco and by the CEO and general director Gianpiero Strisciuglio in front of an audience of stakeholders, including the director of Policies for the Environment, Energy and Mobility of Confindustria Marco Ravazzolo, the president of the Intermodal Transport Section of Anita Emanuele Arcese, the general secretary of Fiap Alessandro Peron, the head of Technology Governance, Energy, Fuel, Material, Transportation Solutions of Fs Italiane Giulia Costagli and the head of Multimodal Logistics Planning and Development by RFI Francesco Lugli.
«EasyRailFreight wants to be a tool to support the logistics and transport of goods by rail, through a digital infrastructure that replicates the physical infrastructure», explained Strisciuglio. «Thanks to the contribution of railway and road transport companies, terminal operators and all operators in the freight sector, we will implement the current digital system to allow the exchange of information, the booking of services and predictive interventions. For this reason, RFI is engaged in a huge process of infrastructure renewal, with an unprecedented investment plan.”
How does it work
The EasyRailFreight platform is the result of a process of comparison and sharing between the Italian Railway Network and sector operators.
In the “Services showcase” module it will be possible, for example, to view the offer of intermodal services available on the market, based on the scheduled freight train timetables and integrating this information with that provided by the operators involved. The user will thus be able to enter the departure or arrival location of interest and the system will respond by providing, for each available service, detailed information such as the time of collection or delivery of the goods, the services available with the related commercial references and the measurement of the degree of decarbonisation of transport (in terms of lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to the all-road solution).
The “Atlas” module (Logistic Atlas of Assets and Services) will also allow a complete geolocalized scan of the structural characteristics of the plants and the related services offered, thus encouraging the meeting between supply and demand and the formulation of hypotheses of logistics solutions, cut tailored to the real needs of the market.
In short, the new platform was designed to incentivize and develop the intermodal transport services available with a view to improving efficiency and quality, but also to increase traffic volumes with possible positive effects in terms of competitiveness for individual companies. Furthermore, the application represents a resource for the entire production system, guaranteeing greater reliability and flexibility in the offer of logistics services. Welcome to the new era of freight transportation.
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