A container multimodal transportation scheduling approach based on immune affinity model for emergency relief

Various disasters with serious results are reported and happen around our lives. Most of them are unconventional contingency events. Emergency relief is an important activity dealing with the disasters to transfer a large number of materials to the destroyed places for casualties and reconstruction for the country, even the world. Container multimodal transportation will play an important role because of its superior characteristics. The relations in the process of supply and transportation build up the container supply chain. It is critical to schedule the multimodal transportation flow of the chain with time efficiency of higher reliability. In this study, the system of container multimodal transportation emergency relief is modeled as an affinity network inspired by the immune system. An integer linear programming model is proposed to build the path selection for container supply chain in the context of emergency relief. The simulation study shows the promising effects of the model. The study is valuable for designing the emergency logistics management system with optimal path selection and flow design of container supply chain in disaster environments. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.