Sustainability SI: Multimode Multicommodity Network Design Model for Intermodal Freight Transportation with Transfer and Emission Costs

Intermodal freight transportation is concerned with shipping of commodities from their origin to destination using combinations of transport modes. Traditional logistics models have concentrated on minimizing transportation costs by appropriately determining the service network and the transportation routing. This paper considers an intermodal transportation problem with an explicit consideration of greenhouse gas emissions and intermodal transfers. A model is described which is in the form of a non-linear integer programming formulation, which is then linearized. A hypothetical but realistic case study of the UK including eleven locations forms the test instances for our investigation, where uni-modal with multi-modal transportation options are compared using a range of fixed costs.