process where goods are moved from a country A to final destination in country B and the
involvement of MTO during their journey. Its aim is to transfer goods in a continuous flow
through the entire transport chain to make a transportation journey more efficient from a
financial, environmental and time perspective (Beresford et al. 2006; SteadieSeifi et al. 2014).
With the massive growth in containerisation and the great shift in thinking from a
conventional unimodal to a system concept multimodal transport approach, multimodal is
currently the main method used in the international transportation process as it enables the
optimisation and organisation of all transport modes into an integrated continuous system in
order to achieve operationally efficient and cost-effective delivery of goods in the supply
chain.
Multimodal transport is often used interchangeably with terms such as intermodal, co-modal
and synchromodal transport. But there are subtle differences between those terms; multimodal
is considered as a type of transportation which uses at least two different modes of transport;
intermodal can be seen as a particular type of multimodal transportation that uses the same
loading unit (e.g. a TEU container), co-modal adds the efficient use of different modes
(resource utilisation) and synchromodal emphasises the real-time aspect of the transport
(SteadieSeifi et al. 2014; UN/ECE 2001). In our paper we use the term multimodal in a broad
sense, however other terms are also used occasionally in the context when we refer to specific
works in the literature or to highlight the differences discussed above.
Figure