Should we keep on renaming a +35-year-old baby?

• At least five concepts relating to freight transport chains exist nowadays.
• Profusion and ambiguity of concepts raise problems at different levels.
• An evolutionary path is traced connecting the five concepts.
• Need for establishing an ontology to support the (re-)definition of concepts.
• Four fundamental domains of specification are proposed.

Over the last +35 years at least five concepts – multimodal, intermodal, combined, co-modal and synchromodal – relating to freight transport chains have been put forward. I pinpoint the main properties of each concept and trace a plausible evolutionary path. The original concept is multimodal transport; the newest one is synchromodal transport. Every new concept borrows certain elements from the previous concepts and introduces new ones.This profusion of concepts is not in itself a hindrance. However, the concepts do exhibit substantial areas of overlap and ambiguity. This status quo facilitates misinterpretation of research efforts and hampers the coherent development of theory, regulations and policies.In this viewpoint, I argue that such an orderly situation can only be attained if there is a unified, or at least consensual, ontology. With an ontology in place, we would (re-)specify the existent concepts following the same principles. The outcome would be unambiguous meanings and clear limits. And herein lies, in my view, the main limitation we face: we still have to agree on the respective domains of specification and on the nature of each concept.I identify a total of four domains, which are: technological domain, organisational and managerial domains, production domain and externalities domain.

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