D5.2: Multimodal transport network for delivering auxiliary supplies to Ukraine

In recent years, the European Union's freight transport network has been affected by a series of systemic disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, and the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. These events have demonstrated that transport resilience is not merely a matter of infrastructure redundancy, but of dynamic adaptation across modes, corridors, and actors. Within this context, the Resilient Multimodal Transport Networks (ReMuNet) project develops a digital platform designed to strengthen multimodal freight resilience through disruption-aware routing and synchromodal coordination.
This deliverable presents a social pilot use case focused on delivering humanitarian assistance to Ukraine under conditions of sustained armed conflict. The case was deliberately selected for its extreme operational environment, where infrastructure damage, fluctuating security conditions, border congestion, and modal shifts occur simultaneously. Rather than treating humanitarian logistics as a separate domain, the report positions it as a real-world stress test of multimodal transport systems. The analysis follows a structured progression. First, it examines how the evolving conflict environment reshaped transport networks, corridor accessibility, and infrastructure functionality. Second, it analyses how humanitarian actors adapted within this constrained environment, coordinating across multiple nodes and borders. Third, these observations are translated into use cases for the ReMuNet platform testing, focusing on disruption-aware routing and prioritisation logic. The humanitarian deliveries examined in this report rely on multimodal transport routes across several European countries, often involving consolidation points near the Ukrainian border and coordination among humanitarian actors to maintain alternative corridors under changing security conditions.
The study employs a mixed-methods approach that combines desk-based research, expert interviews, and partner data validation. Desk research involved mapping ports, airports, rail hubs, consolidation centres, and border crossings across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Quantitative data on freight capacity, routing, and transit times were complemented by qualitative insights gathered from semi-structured interviews with humanitarian logistics experts. Humanitarian partner data, including shipment volumes, warehouse locations, and transit patterns, supplemented the development of pilot scenarios.
The deliverable documents the operational preparation of the order dataset used to simulate the Finland-Ukraine and Germany-Ukraine corridors within the platform. The dataset is derived from empirical humanitarian shipment data and transformed into structured, time-sensitive freight orders. To reflect operational realities, shipments are categorised into urgency classes (urgent, standard, and flexible), each associated with differentiated pickup windows, planning horizons, and delivery constraints. Orders are staggered to generate overlapping time windows and competing service requirements. This structured temporal logic enables the platform to be tested against heterogeneous constraints, including feasibility filtering under tight deadlines, trade-offs between speed and cost across modes, prioritisation among concurrent shipments, and potential late-window rerouting behaviour.
The humanitarian pilot thus functions as an operational bridge between empirical observation and platform experimentation. By embedding real-world stress characteristics into a structured routing problem, the report demonstrates how lessons from conflict-induced disruption can inform broader resilience modelling. The insights generated extend beyond humanitarian logistics and contribute to strengthening the robustness of multimodal freight systems facing diverse forms of disruption across Europe.