Performance Indicators for Planning Intermodal Barge Transportation Systems

Various indicators are used to qualify the performance of intermodal transportation systems. Some of these are found in public documents, e.g., annual company reports, usually providing global measures such as total flow volumes, profits, and share values. While of great interest, such measures are not sufficient to support a fine analysis of different operation strategies, commercial policies, and planning methods. A number of additional measures are therefore used in the scientific literature to address these issues. Our first goal is to review the performance indicators found in public sources and scientific literature and to qualify them with respect to tactical planning of intermodal barge transportation systems. We extend this analysis to include revenue management policies, e.g., market segmentation and differential pricing, a topic generally neglected in freight transportation. We also discuss procedures to generate problem instances that provide the means to analyze planning methods and system behavior based on these performance indicators. This study is clearly of importance to the scientific literature, when comparing proposed models and solution methods. It is of equal value to industry, highlighting the information one should collect out of the massive data flows generated by the cotemporary IT systems, as well as the strategies required to transform this dynamic data into information appropriate for decision making at the tactical planning level, in particular when using revenue management concepts in the service network design.