As is the case in sea freight transport, container traffic is becoming more and more important for inland waterway transport. The increase in turnover by 2015 is estimated to be 10 % p.a. Accordingly, the significance of inland ports and handling facilities in the Hinterland for groupage in pre-carriage and on-carriage is on the rise. To create high-performance transport chains and to support multimodal traffic, there is increasing demand for multimodal (road/rail) and trimodal (road/rail/inland waterway) port facilities. Moreover, inland ports are increasingly being converted into logistics service centers (see Sect. 4.2.6), where procurement-logistical and distribution-logistical services are offered by logistics service providers alongside purely port-logistical services. These developments are largely determined by the characteristics of inland waterway transport, which can be summarized as follows (see Table 5.5).