Reducing the environmental impacts of intermodal transportation: a multi-criteria analysis based on ELECTRE and AHP methods

Nowadays, the impacts of transportation systems on the environment and the society are undeniable. Considering the great environmental awakenings at the planetary level and the discounted growth of the carriage of goods per transportation mode within the European Union, the distribution and haulage companies must start to take measures to limit their impacts. We aim to build a multi-criteria decision support system taking into account the economic, environmental and social criteria in order to help decision makers to choose among several alternatives paths, the “best” path in an intermodal system. Then we have to trade with many conflicting criteria; it’s then appropriate to use multi-criteria decision support system to find the best compromised solution. The route selection in a multimodal transportation network is therefore a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. The goal of this paper is to show how a judicious choice of path and transportation mode in an intermodal transportation system can reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and the energy consumption; in other words, how the route and transportations mode selections can help us to reduce the environment impacts. To this end, we built a decision support system based on AHP and ELECTRE methods. An analysis of the results is done in terms of the quantity of impacts reduced for each “best” choice through an application on a case of freight transport between Paris and Marseille.