A ship-truck intermodal transportation problem
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A ship-truck intermodal transportation problem D a v i d e I n f a n t e , G i u s e p p e P a l e t t a a n d F r a n c e s c a Vo c a t u r o* Departimento di Economia e Statistica, Universita` Della Calabria, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author.
A b s t r a c t This article focuses on an intermodal freight transport service in which containers represent the moved loading units. In particular, it deals with the advantages of combining sea and road transportation – sea for transferring large quantities over long distances, road for collecting and distributing over short or medium distances. With a view to minimizing the total cost of the service, we formulate a ship-truck intermodal transportation problem as a Travelling Purchaser Problem (TPP), in this way broadening the real-world applications field of the TPP. To tackle this problem, a heuristic algorithm is presented and experimentally tested. Computational results indicate that the algorithm is very efficient on a set of benchmark instances, quickly achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2009) 11, 247–259. doi:10.1057/mel.2009.6
Keywords: logistics; freight transport; travelling purchaser problem; heuristic algorithms
Introduction Freight transportation plays a key role in today’s business: it often accounts for two-thirds of the total logistics cost and has a major impact on the level of customer service. Transportation services come in six basic modes: ship, barge, rail, truck, air and pipeline. It is well known that air is the most expensive mode of transportation, followed by truck, rail, pipeline and ship (see Ghiani et al, 2004). Although there are in principle several combinations of the basic modes, r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1479-2931 Maritime Economics & Logistics www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/
Vol. 11, 3, 247–259
Infante et al
in practice only a few of them turn out to be convenient. The most frequent intermodal services are air-truck transportation, train-truck transportation and ship-truck transportation. The most common intermodal transport units are represented by containers, large metal boxes made in standard dimensions and measured in twenty-foot equivalent units. Several publications addressing intermodal transport issues have appeared in the literature, in particular concerning train-truck transportation (see, for example, Arnold et al, 2004; Bontekoning et al, 2004). Macharis and Bontekoning (2004) provide a comprehensive overview of the use of Operations Research in the intermodal transport context for various strategic, tactical and operational problems. Although almost all types of intermodal problems are covered, the number of studies in each category is still very limited. We focus on ship-truck intermodal transportation. In this context, seaport terminals play the role of exchange hubs (see Vis and de Koster, 2003; Steenken et al, 2004) in which containers are moved from ships to trucks and vice versa. The location of sites where the modal
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