The recent Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the key role of the logistics sector, almost to call it “the cardiovascular system of the real economy”. The system, being particularly resilient, has guaranteed the supplies of essential goods and many other key services, both during the lockdown and subsequently. The health emergency represented a stress test for the sector and an incubator for technical and process innovations. On one hand, existing trends, as digitisation and intermodality, have been reinforced and on the other, it has made it impossible to return to the previous situation. Therefore, it is necessary to take the opportunity to implement the changes that have been necessary for a long time to ensure that the sector survives in the long term.
In this context, the Interuniversity Research Centre of Public Economics (CRIEP) of the University of Padua, in collaboration with Interporto Padova S.p.A., proposed in MoveINN project – “environmental and socio-economic assessment of innovations in logistics services”, where it aims at developing, in the two-year period, the role of logistics – in particular intermodal – in the post-Covid19 era.
With the pandemic, the trades managed by the freight villages, in particularly the Padua’s one, have increased in a not negligible way and the difficulty in the distribution of goods, mainly the road transport towards the foreign country, has given a strong impulse to the shift of the rail transport (intermodal logistics). CRIEP aims at exploiting and analysing recent experiences in traffic variation and directing them towards more efficient and sustainable logistics management, employing a model for reading intermodal traffic data to support the strategic choices of the whole sector, a method of logistic impact assessment and to propose of best practices of innovation management in logistic companies.
CRIEP will lead the two-year project starting from the analysis of literature, cases study and data of the traffic of the freight villages and external databases, and it will propose impact assessments and strategic data analysis model. The diffusion of the project results in the reference field is, on one side, an integral part of the project and, on the other, will propose Interporto Padova S.p.A. as a benchmark in the field of logistics, especially the intermodal one. Finally, CRIEP will be the promoter of the collection and exchange of information between the academic and productive world of the Veneto region and the entire Po Valley, not only from a financial point of view but also from an environmental and social one, through the cost-benefit analysis.
Besides being an important research opportunity, MoveINN gives the possibility to the research centre to set a continuous and structured collaboration with the Veneto and the whole productive world.