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Development of a Tool to Assess Effectiveness of Intermodal Facility Locations and Designs

This study is focused on the design and operation of a freight network that supports horizontal carrier collaboration where two or more carriers form an alliance and share pick-up and delivery of jobs. In carrier collaboration, it is assumed that carriers are allowed to retain some of the pickup and delivery jobs they receive from clients while releasing the rest of the jobs to a common pool. Two models are developed: one for strategic planning and one for operations. The objective of the multi-period strategic model is to determine the number and location of intermodal terminals (IMTs) that minimize the total relevant transportation and operational costs, given a set of constraints like ensuring all pickup/delivery demands to/from customers are met, budget, and a limited set of candidate IMT locations. The objective of the operational model is to jointly determine the optimal allocation of jobs from the common pool to the carriers and pickup/delivery routes for each truck. Numerical experiments are conducted using hypothetical networks for both models. Findings from the strategic model indicates that allowing the IMT’s to hold some inventory for a few periods of time provides network flexibility that avoids the need to open additional IMT’s and reduces the need to use high-cost direct shipping to meet demand. Findings from the operational model confirm expectation that carrier collaboration/coordination can yield significant reduction in total cost of serving all pickup and delivery jobs. The amount of reduction depends on the number and location of pickup and delivery jobs that are shared between carriers.

Record URL:

Language

English

Project

Status: Completed
Funding: $142,887
Contract Numbers:
69A3551747117
Sponsor Organizations:
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

University Transportation Centers Program
Department of Transportation
Washington, DC United States 20590

Clemson University

216 Lowry Hall
Clemson, SC, SC United States 29634

University of South Carolina, Columbia

502 Byrnes Building
Columbia, SC United States 29208
Managing Organizations:
University of South Carolina, Columbia

502 Byrnes Building
Columbia, SC United States 29208
Project Managers:
Huynh, Nathan

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main Street, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
Performing Organizations:
University of South Carolina, Columbia

502 Byrnes Building
Columbia, SC United States 29208

Clemson University

110 Lowry Hall
Box 340911
Clemson, SC United States 29634-0911
Principal Investigators:
Huynh, Nathan

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main Street, Columbia, SC 29208, USA

Ferrell, William
Start Date: 20171001
Expected Completion Date: 20180930
Actual Completion Date: 20190531
USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

TRT Terms: Freight and passenger traffic; Logistics; Planning; Transportation
Subject Areas: Energy; Freight Transportation; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

Accession Number: 01690756
Record Type: Research project
Source Agency: Center for Connected Multimodal Mobility
Contract Numbers: 69A3551747117
Files: UTC, RIP
Created Date: Jan 11 2019 3:56PM