A multimodal freight collaborative hub location and network design problem

The study presents an analytical framework to explore the rail-road collaborative paradigm. New collaborative technologies have been developed in recent years and they offer a potential solutions and opportunities for collaboration among all modes of transportation. The most progressive technologies that could fulfill the gap in rail-road collaborative paradigm are identified and presented in this research. The research deals with current state and possible development of collaboration of rail and highway modes of transportation, referred to as rail-road collaboration. Multimodal transportation is the shipment of goods in a single transportation unit. The longest part of the route takes place by rail, inland waterway or sea without handling the goods themselves and for a collection or a final delivery highway mode of transportation is usually used. The main factor for the creation of efficient multimodal transportation network is an appropriate location of multimodal facilities and effective routing through existing transportation network with focus on minimizing the operational costs. The review of developed mathematical models related to this issue is part of this research. The developed models help to determine the internal costs of intermodal collaboration on a freight transportation network. The internal costs consist of operational costs incurred by transportation and intermodal facility operators. These models were not considering time-dependent costs of goods tied in transit. A case study of developed models is applied to sample networks. The dependency of total cost performance on level of collaboration is discussed in sensitivity analysis