Synchromodal freight transport model for cooperative transportation planning

The increasing freight transport demand, the infrastructural saturation of the transport system and its effects on the society and the climate change are relevant factors, signalizing that the achievement of a more sustainable, environmentally friendly and efficient transport system in Europe must be addressed. The information revolution, driven by the development of advanced communication technologies, will strongly affect how transportation and logistics will be conducted in the future. The sharing of information in real-time enables the integration of transport stakeholders through the entire network and opens new business possibilities, like cross-company transport cooperation making a flexible switch between transport modes and operators possible. This work presents an intermodal freight transport network model capable of planning and simulating synchronized transport services. This work contributes to the field of synchromodal transport in two ways: It creates a complete model environment for calculating generated transport costs and environmental impact and it proposes and evaluates three different optimization approaches for an optimal routing and assignment of transport orders from local and global point of view. The benefit of flexible and integrated transport services is demonstrated by evaluating various test cases to encourage logistic service providers to offer synchromodal services and to take common tactical decisions regarding their planning of freight transport routes