Towards Intelligent Intermodal Trade: Industrial Big Data and Analytics in Transportation and Logistics

Managing every industry’s flow of goods, transportation and logistics are a near-literal lifeblood of the global economy, and international trade is soaring. But this growth enables companies in the space to ignore profound problems: they are inefficient, dirty grotesquely underutilized, and miserably unprofitable. Addressing these failures, key innovations are starting to capture, compile, and analyze the vast amounts of data that today’s dumb systems ignore, adding to the intermodal mix, while advanced data management and analytics to bring intelligence. Change from outside can come swiftly, as shown in the past by containerization and eCommerce. In the next decade, intermodal and intelligent technologies will create a hypermodal system that moves not just goods, but supply, demand, and means of production – transporting packages as fast as the internet does packets.