Stable container-route matching in multimodal transport: A case of Yangtze River Economic Belt

Abstract

Multimodal transport is promoted along the Yangtze River Economic Belt to facilitate transport between rivers and seas. This paper introduces a container-route matching problem with choice behavior in multimodal transport of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The concept of stable matching is used to assign containers to multimodal routes in which shippers have preferences over multimodal routes and multimodal routes have preferences over shipment groups. The preference is formed as a combination of self-preference regarding freight rates and transport time, and other-preference regarding cooperation. A stable container-route matching model is formulated to tailor the non-independent preferences of shippers and route operators. A local search algorithm is designed to solve the stable container-route matching problem. The multimodal transport along the Yangtze River Economic Belt including river-sea combined transport, river-sea transport and rail-sea combined transport is used to validate the proposed model. Extensive computational experiments show that it costs to keep the cooperative relationship to avoid the risks from market fluctuations. When shipments of cooperative partners need to be transported, the total capacity utilization of routes reduces by 26 %. For high-value cargo and time-sensitive cargo, the time preference of shippers has a greater impact than the freight preference. River-sea transport is more competitive than rail-sea combined transport.