Toward freight mobility-as-a-service through digital freight platforms and multimodal operations

Freight Mobility-as-a-Service (FMaaS) has been proposed as an open platform integrating scheduled and on-demand freight services. However, its conceptual boundaries, governance requirements, operational capabilities, and performance implications remain unclear because most relevant knowledge is dispersed across adjacent research streams. This study systematically reviews 69 publications from Scopus and Web of Science published between January 2015 and June 2026. The findings distinguish FMaaS from freight matching and related platforms through four characteristics: shipper-oriented access, end-to-end service composition, multimodal integration, and platform-supported coordination. The synthesis also reveals a visibility-control paradox, whereby the transparency required for coordination may discourage providers from sharing commercially sensitive information. Moreover, only four of the 14 integrated platform-multimodal studies provide substantive performance evidence, indicating an architecture-evidence gap between proposed systems and demonstrated outcomes. The review positions FMaaS as both a platform-governance arrangement and a multimodal orchestration system. It proposes future research on interoperable booking, stakeholder participation, neutral governance, commercial sustainability, regulatory accountability, and end-to-end performance evaluation.