Abstract
Rail–truck intermodal terminals are an important type of dry port and play a vital role in inland freight transport. This paper addresses the container loading problem in rail–truck intermodal terminals considering energy consumption under the sustainability concept. We analyze the effect factors of energy efficiency for container loading operations and develop an optimization model to minimize the total handling time and container reshuffling. A genetic algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal container loading sequence. Computational experiments on a specific Chinese rail–truck intermodal terminal were conducted to evaluate the performance of our approach. Results show our approach has a good performance for different sizes, and the total handing time, reshuffling times and energy consumption of the handling task are prominently decreased.
Highlights
Intermodal freight transport involves the transportation of freight in an intermodal container or vehicle using multiple modes of transportation without any handling of the freight itself when changing modes
Because of differences between two types of intermodal terminals in operation procedures and rules, the existing studies are hard directly apply to rail–truck intermodal terminals. (ii) The energy consumption of intermodal terminals has been the subject of much more attention in recent years, but current studies on energy consumption all focus on container ports; specific literature considering energy consumption in rail–truck intermodal terminal is scarce. (iii) In the scarce literature related to rail–truck intermodal terminals, studies only focused on improving handling efficiency and did not consider energy consumption while optimizing operations
All outbound containers are handled in the main operation area of rail–truck intermodal terminals, which is configured with arrival–departure lines, truck operation lanes, inbound container yard, outbound container yard and rail-mounted gantry cranes
Summary
Intermodal freight transport involves the transportation of freight in an intermodal container or vehicle using multiple modes of transportation (e.g., rail, ship, truck) without any handling of the freight itself when changing modes. As key nodes of the freight transportation network, intermodal terminals have numerous heavy-duty pieces of equipment These equipment operations can cause vast quantities of energy consumption and pollutant emission, so intermodal terminals play an important role in sustainable transportation development. Terminals need to consider handling efficiency and energy consumption when they optimize loading, unloading and stockpiling operations. With the rapid development of worldwide shipping and inland freight transportation corridors, inland container transportation volume has experienced a sharp increase, which generates a higher demand for handling efficiency of rail–truck intermodal terminals. Rail–truck intermodal terminals must optimize equipment utilization to improve handling efficiency, as well as considering sustainable development to reduce energy consumption. The container loading optimization problem in rail–truck intermodal terminal is considered. Computational results are reported in the sixth section and the final section covers the conclusion
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