Robust Tabu Search Algorithm for Planning Rail-Truck Intermodal Freight Transport
In this paper a new efficient tabu search algorithm for assigning freight to the intermodal transport connections was developed. There were also formulated properties of the problem that can be used to design robust heuristic algorithms based on the local
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bstract. In this paper a new efficient tabu search algorithm for assigning freight to the intermodal transport connections was developed. There were also formulated properties of the problem that can be used to design robust heuristic algorithms based on the local search methods. The quality of solutions produced by the tabu search algorithm and by often recommended greedy approach were also compared. Keywords: Intermodal transport
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· Optimization · Tabu search
Introduction
Road transportation is very expensive. Because of that, carrying goods over a long distance is achieved as a combination of different types of transportation (e.g. with the use of rail, ships and trucks). Such means of transportation is called intermodal freight transport. The problems related to the intermodal transport are intensely studied by the Operations Research. Thanks to such activities, transport infrastructure can be better designed, vehicle routes and delivery schedules can be planned more consciously which results in savings and consequently may lead to lower prices of transported goods. A widely used definition of intermodal freight transport was introduced at the European Conference of Ministers of Transport. It was defined as “the movement of goods in one and the same loading unit or vehicle by successive modes of transport without handling of the goods themselves when changing modes”. Second commonly used definition was introduced by Macharis and Bontekoning [18]. They define it as “the combination of at least two modes of transport in a single transport chain, without the change of container for the goods, with most of the route travelled by rail, inland waterway or ocean-going vessel and with the shortest possible initial and final journeys by road”. More definitions of intermodal freight transport can be found in [6]. Problems related to the intermodal transport are much more complex to solve than problems which take into consideration a fixed type of transportation (aka c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved K. Saeed and W. Homenda (Eds.): CISIM 2016, LNCS 9842, pp. 289–299, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45378-1 26
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unimodal problems). Moreover, models used to solve unimodal problems are also applied to intermodal transport problems. For this reason, there is a group of people convinced that intermodal transportation research is emerging as a new transportation research field and it is still in the pre-paradigmatic phase and proper models are not known at the moment (see [6,18]). Bontekoning, Macharis and Trip [6] described the actual state of intermodal transport research field and marked actions which should be done to make it similar to “normal science”. They proved that the intermodal transport research is in the pre-paradigmatic phase. They found plenty of small research communities that address intermodal transport problems. They proposed transformation of these small communities to one or two
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