Applying quality concepts to achieve environmental sustainability in the freight transport sector – reviewing process management and lean

A systematic scientometric review of sustainable rail freight transportation

The negative externalities of freight transport have caught the attention of scholars and practitioners to study sustainable freight transportation. Past studies have reviewed sustainable logistics from varying perspectives, but the rail mode-specific sustainable logistics has not been thoroughly reviewed. This sets the motivation to review existing research on sustainable rail freight transportation (SRFT). A science mapping approach was used to develop and visualize bibliographic networks of 378 articles published between 2001 and 2022 and indexed in the Scopus database. Four scientometric analysis techniques, namely journal co-citations; countries/organizations/authors co-authorship; document co-citations; and keywords co-occurrence, were employed in the VOSviewer software to reveal conceptual structure, social structure, and influential themes of the SRFT domain. Based on the results, the SRFT knowledge was categorized into six thematic branches (31 sub-branches), namely intermodal transportation for decarbonization; green policies, risk, and energy assessment research; savings in externalities for a sustainable future; decision-making with environmental and economic considerations; case studies and applications in SRFT research; and technological advancements towards sustainability. Finally, future research directions were proposed in the form of research questions. This systematic literature review will facilitate the researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the status quo, existing research gaps, and emerging research topics in the SRFT research domain. This study is restricted to research articles and review articles published in English and indexed in the Scopus database.

Metamorphoses of Earnings in the Transport Sector of the V4 Region

The transportation sector is a crucial sector of the sustainability of every national economy. Previous studies highlighted the core significance of transport enterprises in European countries over the past 60 years. The long-term sustainability of enterprises is determined by their ability to gain earnings. Thus, earnings are the synonym of significance in corporate life. The purpose of this study was to capture the lever year, the trend, and the slope of the development of earnings in the transport sector before the COVID-19 pandemic. Time series of the annual earnings of the enterprises from the close countries of the V4 region were used during a 10-year period. Buishand’s test sets the change-points of the development and indicated the values of specific central lines. The year 2013 was the lever date for the earnings of 830 Slovak and 1042 Hungarian enterprises. The year 2015 was the year of momentum for 757 Polish enterprises. The development of 397 Czech enterprises was mainly influenced by the year 2014. The results of the Mann–Kendall test detected a positive trend in the series of business finance in all countries. In addition, the Sen’s slope was estimated in the transport sector for the analyzed period 2010–2019.