Routing of freight transportation in logistics of agriculture

Abstract

The development of national transport system impacts the performance of enterprises, and therefore, its viability in the market conditions. At the same time, the market is the exchange of goods and services, which is impossible without transport. Transport is a crucial component of the market infrastructure. It is essential to consolidate all the transport sectors into a multimodal transportation system, which would be convenient in terms of customer servicing, shipment time and accuracy, cargo safety, end-to-end information support, and financial relationships as well. Traditionally, the applied science deals with management of train and rail car traffic, stations, and rolling stock. In practice, carriers and cargo owners often have different priorities. The carrier needs to comply with routes and delivery time, while the customer is more concerned about shiploads, consistency in the delivery of carload shipments, and clearly scheduled delivery times. The problem of determination of ways to develop a unified transport environment facilitated by integrated multimodal transportation techniques is of a higher relevance. The purpose of this research is to identify certain stages of freight transportation, study the opportunities of applying various transportation techniques focusing on operating costs reduction, and to analyze the ways to improve routed transportation to the mutual benefit of both carriers and shippers. This work employs research methods to analyze freight transportation, and methods of mathematical modeling of the transportation process subject to introducing new techniques to minimize the number of re-classifications made on the route and reduce operating costs at unloading stations. As a result, the criteria have been identified to determine the choice of railroad transport operation activities subject to minimizing costs throughout the operating domain.