Abstract
This paper studies the recovery of an intermodal freight system from a major disruption and develops a model for optimising vehicle schedules under disrupted conditions. The proposed model optimises the recovery of a single-terminal system with relatively short feeder routes on which vehicle roundtrip times are exponentially distributed and arrivals at the terminal are Poisson-distributed. Mathematical expectations are used to formulate the deterministic equivalent for the scheduling problem and a genetic algorithm is applied to optimise the schedules on main routes. The model developed in this paper can be applied to single-terminal transfer systems with any combination of transportation modes using discrete vehicles, as long as the feeder arrivals do not deviate much from the assumed Poisson distributions. Since its computational time is relatively insensitive to the numbers of vehicles on feeder routes, this model can be used to efficiently optimise intermodal systems with numerous vehicle arrivals.
Highlights
Efficient transfer coordination in an intermodal transportation network can reduce the dwell times of cargos at the transfer terminals where various routes interconnect, thereby increasing the vehicle utilisation rates, reducing the need for direct routes to connect many origins and destinations, reducing storage requirements at transfer terminals, and improving total system efficiency
This paper studied the recovery of a single-terminal intermodal freight system from a disruption
A model was developed that optimises the schedule of vehicles on main routes assuming Poisson arrivals on feeder routes
Summary
Efficient transfer coordination in an intermodal transportation network can reduce the dwell times of cargos at the transfer terminals where various routes interconnect, thereby increasing the vehicle utilisation rates, reducing the need for direct routes to connect many origins and destinations, reducing storage requirements at transfer terminals, and improving total system efficiency. In this paper we analyse an intermodal freight system with a single transfer hub and develop a model that optimises the schedule of vehicles on main routes while assuming Poisson arrivals on feeder routes. This model determines the departure times on main routes that minimize the supplier’s overall system cost, including storage, vehicle, in-terminal operation and late delivery penalty costs. In this paper we provide a computationally less demanding model by assuming exponentially distributed vehicle roundtrips and fixed fleet size on feeder routes These assumptions allow us to model the arrivals as a stationary Poisson process and derive the expectations needed to formulate a scheduling problem that is optimised much more efficiently than the stochastic program in [8]. Operating less than full airplanes may require running additional flights, thereby increasing the airline service cost
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