Improving the resilience of the inland river transportation chain with flexible freight consolidation strategy under epidemic

Abstract

The inland waterway transportation is generally recognized to be the environmentally friendly transportation mode. However, it is relatively weak resilience to the service disruptions. In the post-pandemic era, the regular epidemic prevention is still one of the main considerations for waterway transportation since it undertakes the vast majority of global trade and faces more risk of epidemic spreading. This paper considers a multi-modal transportation system consisted in road network and inland waterway network. The epidemics occur in one or several regions, which would increase the monetary and time cost in the transportation process. We propose the flexible freight consolidation strategy to guide the cargos to be concentrated among the ports via the multi-modal transportation system. The proposed strategy can be built a non-linear mathematical programming model, which can discretized to a 0–1 Knapsack problem by the finite element method and calculated with branch-and-bound algorithm. The Yangtze River Economic Belt is adopted to illustrate validity of the proposed strategy and algorithm.