Advanced EWM-TM integration for seamless multi-modal transportation and yard logistics

As warehouse management and transportation management become increasingly consolidated, their integration has become a critical stage in digitally coordinated logistics, particularly where rail, road, port, terminal, and yard processes intersect. Purpose: This review examines scholarly literature relevant to the state-of-the-art EWM–TM integration to ensure seamless multi-modal transportation and yard logistics with EWM-TM integration viewed as the tightly integrated management of the warehouse operations, transport planning, appointment control, yard movements and event-based replanning. Scope: The article is a review of peer-reviewed literature on warehouse operations, intermodal planning, cross-docking, container terminal logistics, enterprise application integration, Internet of Things architectures, and Logistics 4.0. Findings: In the literature, it has been established that inventory visibility, door scheduling, yard staging, and mode-specific transport planning can be synchronized in a shared decision structure to yield significant performance improvement. Meanwhile, the reviewed literature shows incomplete connections between strategic network models and real-time implementation logic, limited consideration of yard uncertainty, and the limited capability to translate digital event streams into robust control rules. Implications: This area is important because fragmented execution is one of the key factors that lead to delays, congestion, underutilization of assets, and unreliable services in multi-modal logistics. A state-of-the-art EWM–TM research agenda should include interoperable data frameworks, event-driven optimization, and more empirical validation and an integrated set of warehouse, yard, and transport performance metrics.