A Global Intermodal Shipment Matching Problem Under Travel Time Uncertainty

Global intermodal transportation involves the movement of shipments between inland terminals located in different continents by using ships, barges, trains, trucks, or any combination among them through integrated planning at a network level. One of the challenges faced by global operators is the matching of shipment requests with transport services in an integrated global network. The characteristics of the global intermodal shipment matching problem include acceptance and matching decisions, soft time windows, capacitated services, and transshipments between multimodal services. The objective of the problem is to maximize the total profits which consist of revenues, travel costs, transfer costs, storage costs, delay costs, and carbon tax. Travel time uncertainty has significant effects on the feasibility and profitability of matching plans. However, travel time uncertainty has not been considered in global intermodal transport yet leading to significant delays and infeasible transshipments. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes a chance-constrained programming model in which travel times are assumed stochastic. We conduct numerical experiments to validate the performance of the stochastic model in comparison to a deterministic model and a robust model. The experiment results show that the stochastic model outperforms the benchmarks in total profits.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Transport Engineering and Logistic