Abstract
This study focuses on the route selection problem of multimodal transportation: When facing a shortage of containers, a transport plan must be designed for freight forwarders that realizes the optimal balance between transportation time and transportation cost. This problem is complicated by two important characteristics: (1) The use of containers is related to transport routes, and they interact with each other; and (2) Different types of containers should be used in different time ranges for different modes of transportation. To solve this problem, we establish a multi-objective optimization model for minimizing the total transportation time, transportation cost and container usage cost. To solve the multi-objective programming model, the normalized normal constraint method (NNCM) is used to obtain Pareto solutions. We conducted a case study considering the transportation of iron ore in Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province. The results demonstrate that using railway containers and railway transportation as much as possible in route selection can effectively solve the problem of container shortage and balance transportation time and transportation cost.
Highlights
With the increasing global economic integration, the sustainable development of world economy and society needs the support of an efficient freight transportation system [1] (Wu and Chang, 2019)
This paper mainly focuses on the scenario in which freight forwarders must consider the links between containers and transport routes when planning multimodal transport routes in the case of a shortage of containers
Regardless of the mode of transportation, when using a time limit of containers that is less than 84.22 h, no railway containers are available, and the final result is the selection of shipping containers
Summary
With the increasing global economic integration, the sustainable development of world economy and society needs the support of an efficient freight transportation system [1] (Wu and Chang, 2019). If the containers are returned when they are overdue, the enterprise will incur a poor use record in the railway freight transport system, which will result in late fines and will render it more difficult to rent containers time. Freight forwarding enterprises must carefully calculate the cost of using containers and weigh the conditions of using containers. It is a constraint of “container shortage”. The main contribution of this paper is to establish a multi-objective programming model to solve the multimodal transportation planning problem when freight forwarders are facing container shortage, considering the binding of container usage and transport modes. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: the third part introduces the optimization model of the routing problem for multimodal transport under a container usage restriction; the fourth part describes the solution algorithm for the model; the fifth part presents the case study; and the last section presents the conclusions of this work and discusses its prospects
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