MULTIPLIER - Modular Urban Lumber housing Transport by Inland waterways Planning including Last mile Infrastructure aimed at Emission Reduction
MULTIPLIER is a large cross-disciplinary project that addresses a major challenge in the Dutch construction transition: scaling prefabricated modular housing while drastically reducing logistics-related emissions. The project uses the expected growth to up to 50,000 prefab houses per year as a demand-side driver for more efficient logistics, while inland waterway transport (IWT) acts as the scalable low-emission transport solution. MULTIPLIER develops an AI-driven end-to-end decision-support system that connects factory production schedules, inland shipping capacity, terminal and hub availability, and urban delivery constraints to determine when inland shipping is feasible and how multimodal prefab flows can best be bundled, scheduled, and synchronized. The consortium brings together universities, prefab manufacturers, IT providers, logistics and terminal partners, and municipalities to validate this approach in practice and enable cleaner, smarter, and more scalable construction logistics. MULTIPLIER involves next to University of Twente, also Hogeschool Utrecht, prefab housing factories Plegt-Vos and HDO Groep, IT solution providers (Cape Groep, Bureau Voorlichting Binnenvaart), logistics and terminal partners (Peterson Nederland, Port of Twente, Metropolitan Hub System), municipalities (Amsterdam, Leiden, Den Haag), Logistics Overijssel and Logistics Navigators.
