Design of placing the container reloading station by applying the Operations Research methods: a research study

Abstract

The manuscript is focused on the design of methodical procedure to locate container reloading station of national importance in the examined country. Slovakia represents the investigated country where ten container reloading stations , specialized above all in transshipment of loading units, are currently in operation. The introductory parts of the manuscript outline the most important concepts associated with the very term of intermodal transport, container reloading stations in the given country as well as a brief literature review in a given context. The following parts discuss the specification of relevant data and methods for this study as well as a description of the general procedure of multi-criteria evaluation of alternatives; namely consisting of, identifying a set of alternatives (Slovak regions), establishing a set of criteria and determining the weights of such criteria. The last part of the manuscript addresses forming a criteria matrix and subsequent calculations in order to search for the most suitable region when applying particular techniques of Operations Research. Specifically, the weights of criteria being determined based on the Saaty quantitative pairwise comparison method, and the final procedure in the context of selecting the most suitable alternative is suggested by using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (also called as the TOPSIS method).