From Fragmented Freight to System Thinking. The Role of HOLOGISTICS in System-Level Freight Decarbonisation
Freight transport sits at the centre of Europe’s sustainability challenge. It supports economic activity and the everyday movement of goods, yet it remains one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonise. Despite years of efficiency improvements, digital innovation, and policy ambition, transport emissions remain persistently high. At the same time, logistics networks continue to operate in fragmented ways, shaped by modes, national boundaries, and organisational silos.
This persistence does not reflect a lack of effort or innovation. It reflects a deeper structural mismatch. Emissions are generated at system level, while decisions are taken locally. As long as freight flows are planned and optimised within individual networks, the broader system remains inefficient, and climate targets remain difficult to achieve.
Why Decarbonisation Stalls
Freight decarbonisation is often treated as a technological challenge. In practice, the constraints are more fundamental.
Large-scale expansion of infrastructure is limited by cost, planning timelines, and societal acceptance, especially when projects face local resistance or competing land use priorities. Building new rail corridors or dedicated freight networks is possible, but it will take time and is unlikely to happen at the scale required in the near term.
Zero-emission propulsion technologies are progressing, most visibly through electrification, but also including hydrogen-based solutions and other emerging alternatives, particularly in urban and regional transport where operations are more predictable. In long-haul applications, however, constraints persist not only in terms of infrastructure, but in the reliability of range under real operating conditions, charging times, and grid capacity. Even where technical solutions exist, deployment remains highly dependent on route structure and infrastructure access. Full fleet electrification across all use cases therefore remains a longer-term prospect.
In tightly timed parcel networks, for example, transport flows are not only defined by distance or cost, but by fixed sortation windows and delivery commitments. This limits the ability to dynamically re-route shipments or shift volumes between modes, even when alternative capacity exists.
More broadly, the transition is shaped by the need to align multiple interdependent elements, including vehicles, energy supply, infrastructure, and operational models. While progress is visible across each of these dimensions, they are not yet developing at the same pace or within a coordinated framework.
These constraints do not reduce the urgency of decarbonisation. They define the conditions under which it must happen.
Much of the current discussion focuses on individual levers such as electrifying fleets, expanding alternative fuels, shifting freight to rail, or deploying more advanced digital tools. All of these are necessary, but none of them is sufficient on its own.
The deployment of zero-emission technologies within fragmented networks improves local efficiency, but does not address empty runs or underutilised capacity. Modal shift without coordinated planning struggles with reliability and flexibility. Digital solutions applied within companies tend to optimise within organisational boundaries rather than across networks.
Individual improvements are being made, but the system they operate in remains largely unchanged. As a result, progress tends to remain local, improving efficiency within individual networks without fundamentally changing how freight flows across the broader system.
What the Evidence Shows
Stakeholder feedback collected as part of the EU-funded HOLOGISTICS project, a collaborative initiative focused on freight decarbonisation and logistics system innovation, reflects this dynamic clearly. Zero-emission propulsion technologies, along with renewable energy integration, dominate sustainability priorities, which is both understandable and justified. Electrification in particular represents one of the most tangible levers currently available.
At the same time, respondents consistently point to infrastructure gaps, high investment costs, fragmented digital systems, and limited interoperability as key barriers to implementation.
This does not suggest a misunderstanding of the challenge, but highlights a structural tension. While investment is directed towards the right areas, there is no clear operational framework guiding how these elements should work together in practice. Electrification, intermodal transport, and digitalisation are advancing, but largely without integration.
As a result, progress remains incremental rather than transformative, with improvements realised at the component level rather than across the system. Decarbonisation therefore depends less on adding new solutions, and more on how existing ones are coordinated and combined.
Collaboration, but Not Coordination
Signs of change are already visible. Collaboration is increasing where inefficiencies are most apparent.
Shared parcel infrastructure, such as out-of-home delivery networks and parcel lockers, reduces duplication in urban enviroments by consolidating delivery points and increasing drop density. In rail freight, progress toward interoperable data exchange is improving visibility across national systems. More broadly, joint initiatives, shared warehousing, and transport pooling reflect a growing willingness to collaborate when operational benefits are clear and immediate.
These developments demonstrate that the sector is capable of collaboration when it delivers tangible gains, such as improved asset utilisation or reduced duplication. However, these efforts remain localised and domain-specific rather than systemic.
Planning, routing, and optimisation largely continue to take place within organisational boundaries. While assets may be shared in specific contexts, the underlying networks remain fragmented. The industry is beginning to collaborate, but it is not yet operating as a coordinated system.
Concepts based on more interconnected and shared logistics networks point toward a potential framework for addressing this challenge. They envision freight moving through systems in which assets such as transport capacity, infrastructure, and information are used collaboratively rather than in isolation.
In practice, however, this directly challenges the economic logic on which many logistics networks are built. Sharing capacity, infrastructure, or data often means engaging with competitors and reconsidering long-established assumptions about ownership, control, and differentiation.
For many operators, this raises concerns about loss of control, reduced differentiation, and increased dependency on external partners. Logistics networks have traditionally been built as proprietary assets, forming the basis of competitive advantage and customer relationships.
As a result, decisions that are rational at the level of individual firms do not necessarily lead to efficient outcomes at system level. Local optimisation can coexist with systemic inefficiencies, particularly where empty capacity, duplication, and misaligned flows remain unaddressed.
This reflects how competition in freight logistics is currently structured, with optimisation focused on individual networks rather than system-wide performance.
A Different Logic Is Needed
Given these dynamics, the central question becomes unavoidable. If infrastructure cannot be rebuilt at scale in the short term, and fleets cannot be fully replaced overnight, how can meaningful emissions reduction be achieved?
The answer lies less in expanding capacity and more in using existing capacity differently. Many of the inefficiencies in freight transport are not technical, but structural. They result from duplication, limited coordination, and lack of interoperability across networks.
The issue is no longer a lack of solutions, but the growing cost and inefficiency of operating them in isolation.
This points toward the need for a different organising logic rather than another standalone solution.
The Physical Internet as a Reference Framework
The Physical Internet offers one way to think about this shift. Inspired by how data moves through digital networks, it describes a system in which goods move through interconnected, interoperable networks using shared infrastructure and standardised units.
It is not a fixed blueprint or a technology platform. It is a reference framework that helps reframe logistics as a system rather than a collection of separate operations.
In practice, many emerging developments already point in this direction. Greater interoperability, shared infrastructure, and more dynamic planning are becoming necessary as complexity increases.
The question is no longer whether freight networks will become more interconnected, but how deliberately this transition will be shaped.
Where HOLOGISTICS Fits
It is within the gap between technological progress and system coordination that HOLOGISTICS, an EU-funded collaborative project, is positioned.
Rather than introducing a single solution, HOLOGISTICS builds on this premise, framing freight decarbonisation as a system design challenge rather than a purely technological one. It asks a more fundamental question: how can existing decarbonisation approaches be made to work together within a coherent operational framework?
The project uses Physical Internet principles as a reference point and explores how they can be applied incrementally within current constraints.
HOLOGISTICS brings together a set of complementary innovations across three areas: physical assets, data ecosystems, and advanced planning tools. Modular loading units reduce friction between transport modes. Interoperable data platforms enable shared visibility and coordination across actors. Advanced planning tools support the dynamic balancing of cost, service, and emissions in increasingly complex networks.
Importantly, these elements are not designed as standalone solutions. Their value emerges only when applied in combination, under real operational constraints. Improved visibility alone does not optimise flows without corresponding planning capabilities, just as modular equipment requires coordinated network access to realise its full potential.
This interdependence reflects the broader premise of HOLOGISTICS: that system performance depends not on isolated innovation, but on how effectively different components are integrated and aligned.
Each of these elements directly addresses constraints outlined earlier: fragmentation, limited interoperability, and the gap between local optimisation and system-level performance.
The value lies less in each individual component and more in how they interact. The real test is not whether new solutions exist, but whether they can function together under real operational conditions. That is the gap HOLOGISTICS is designed to explore.
A Realistic Path Forward
Progress is already underway across the sector. Zero-emission propulsion technologies are expanding, digitalisation is improving visibility, and collaboration is becoming more common. These developments are essential.
Their impact, however, will remain limited if they continue to evolve independently. What is needed is a way to align them.
The HOLOGISTICS approach does not assume a complete transformation of infrastructure or fleets. Instead, it focuses on how existing systems can be connected, standardised, and better coordinated.
Decarbonisation will not come from replacing the system overnight. It will come from making the system work differently.
From Fragmentation to Coordination
Europe is approaching a critical point. The need to reduce emissions is clear, and the available solutions are advancing. What remains uncertain is how these solutions will be combined into a coherent system.
The Physical Internet provides a useful reference point for this transition. HOLOGISTICS takes this one step further by exploring how these ideas can be applied in practice, within real operational, economic, and regulatory constraints.
The open question is not whether system-level coordination will emerge, but whether the industry is prepared to actively shape it, or continue adapting to it under growing operational and regulatory pressure.
Acknowledgment
The development of the proposed methodology is part of the EU-funded project, HOLOGISTICS, which received funding from the Horizon Europe Program under the Grant Agreement number 101202556.
About the Author
Nicole Tuplin has over 18 years of experience in European logistics and linehaul network planning, including extensive work at UPS. Her work focuses on optimisation, and improving operational efficiency across complex logistics networks. She contributed to the EU-funded HOLOGISTICS project on freight decarbonisation and logistics innovation.
