An Extended Notion of Hinterland Connectivity to Analyze Multimodal Integration in European Hinterland Service Networks

The competitive position of sea ports depends on their capability to forward incoming cargo from overseas to its final destination. Such capability is associated with the hinterland connectivity of the sea port. Hinterland connectivity of a port is mostly treated as a local indicator, describing the number of different hinterland locations served by a port via a direct service. However, with intermodality being on the rise, transfer connections and connections including multimodal transshipment become more feasible and common. This turns hinterland transport into a complex multimodal network, whose connectivity cannot be captured by the existing local notion. Using methods from the science of complex networks, this work extends the notion of hinterland connectivity by non-local (network) and multimodal aspects, and uses this notion to analyze hinterland connectivity for the European hinterland transport network of scheduled rail and barge services. The results show that overall structural capability to perform hinterland transport assignments increases tremendously as transfer connections and multimodal routes are established. Moreover, non-local measures show that ports with poor local connectivity can still be well positioned within a network, an insight that would be overlooked in a purely local analysis. Last but not least, all ports benefit individually from multimodal integration, but some do more than others. For instance, 'Multimodal hubs' are the most important contributors to multimodal integration, but their relative accessibility does not improve much