Congested roads and highways, ailing bridges, noise and exhaust pollution – North Rhine Westphalia suffers from constant trafficinduced congestion and pollution on the road. In order to distribute import and export containers in the Ruhr area as well as the northern and eastern parts of the state, the logistics researchers of the Development Centre for Ship Technology and Transport Systems (DST) in Duisburg have developed a logistics concept based on small inland barges to be operated in the West German canal network and on a heterogeneous set of transhipment solutions. As part of this logistics concept, the transportation network has been designed with all active and inactive transhipment points in the geographic area concerned identified and included into the basic network. The freight volumes occurring in the related municipalities have been collected and assigned to the various ports and transhipment points of the network according to predetermined rules. Moreover, the transportation costs of current transport chains, such as direct truck transport, a bimodal transport chain with trucks and inland vessels, and a new transport chain with an IWT leg in the pre-haul have been compared with each other. The vessel concept includes seven inland vessel types ranging from 50 to 95 metres in length, 6.80 to 9.50 metres in width, and 8 to 36 TEU in load capacity. They are designed as single-layer transport vehicles due to unfavourable bridge heights in the geographic area concerned. The transhipment concept includes the adoption of both existing and novel solutions. Existing container handling infrastructure is to be utilized to the greatest possible extent, as it lowers the need for infrastructural investments at the respective transhipment locations considerably. In order to link such transhipment locations that have no container handling equipment at hand and are not likely to acquire such to the new service, the concept includes a mobile on-board crane. With respect to the integration concept, the designated service is embedded into existing transport chains and value-creation networks, for example the existing liner services on the Rhine. Moreover, it is harmonized with existing planning and monitoring systems in the transportation and logistics domain. By doing so, the potential of inland waterway transportation for growth and its promise of reliability, cost efficiency and energy efficiency is turned into reality