Abstract:
The exponential growth of the flow of goods and passengers, fragility of certain products and the
need for the optimization of transport costs impose on carriers to use more and more multimodal
transport. In addition, the need for intermodal transport policy has been strongly driven by
environmental concerns and to benefit from the combination of different modes of transport to
cope with the increased economic competition.This research is mainly concerned with the
Intermodal Terminal Location Problem introduced recently in scientific literature which consists
to determine a set of potential sites to open and how to route requests to a set of customers
through the network while minimizing the total cost of transportation. We begin by presenting a
description of the problem. Then, we present a mathematical formulation of the problem and
discuss the sense of its constraints. The objective function to minimize is the sum of road costs
and railroad combined transportation costs.As the problem is NP-hard, we propose an efficient
real coded genetic algorithm for solving. Our solutions are compared to CPLEX and also to the
heuristics reported in the literature. Numerical results show that our approach outperforms the
other approaches. A realistic cost approximation of intermodal transportation is used to validate
the experimental results.
Machine summary:
"com An efficient genetic algorithm to solve the intermodal terminal location problem Mustapha Oudani a,b*, Ahmed El Hilali Alaoui a, Jaouad Boukachour b a Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Morocco b Le Havre University, Le Havre, France Abstract The exponential growth of the flow of goods and passengers, fragility of certain products and the need for the optimization of transport costs impose on carriers to use more and more multimodal transport.
This research is mainly concerned with the Intermodal Terminal Location Problem introduced recently in scientific literature which consists to determine a set of potential sites to open and how to route requests to a set of customers through the network while minimizing the total cost of transportation.
For this raison, several researchers propose solutions including: • Effective attractiveness to build competitive networks • Environment respect by promoting modal shift from road transportation to nonpolluting and consolidated modes • Confirmed safety where the main concern is to profit from the safety of certain mode for the transport of hazardous materials (hazmat) These three issues are the most important subjects in the intermodal transportation literature.
(2010), presented a bi-objective optimization model for rail-truck intermodal transportation, where intermodal route selection is driven by the delivery-times specified by customers and they proposed an iterative decomposition based solution for solving the problem."