the exponential growth of the flow of goods and passengers, fragility of certain products and the need for the optimization of transport costs impose on carriers to use more and more multimodal transport. in addition, the need for intermodal transport policy has been strongly driven by environmental concerns and to benefit from the combination of different modes of transport to cope with the in...

While largely due to conditions outside their control, the configuration and setting of current intermodal rail terminals contribute to congestion and increased freight handling volumes that have resulted in additional transportation costs for shippers and carriers. Although a substantial body of research has focused on improving the efficiency of port operations and multi-modal freight shipmen...

The Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are the largest container port complex in North America and fifth largest in the world. Growth in U.S. Pacific Rim trade has put pressure on the landside transportation systems serving these two ports. In order to address this growth and mitigate environmental impacts, the ports are implementing new operational strategies and infrastructure improvements. ...

today, transportation of hazardous materials (i.e., hazmat) is a very important issue for researchersdue to the risk of this transit, which should be considered for development of industries and transportation.therefore, a model that is useful should consider the risk and damage to humanitarianand environmental issues due to transit of hazmat materials. by considering the related cost, thereali...

A simulation tool to model the flow of Intermodal Terminal Units (ITUs) among intermodal terminals is presented. This terminal simulator tool is part of the DGVII EC-funded PLATFORM project. The terminal model is composed by road and rail gates and by a set of platforms. Intermodal terminals are inter-connected by rail corridors. Each terminal serves a user catchment via a road network. The int...

An intermodal rail terminal is a facility where the transfer of cargo occurs between truck and rail. The operations within these terminals involve many resources and operating rules. The ability of a terminal to respond to activity peaks that occur as a result of train arrivals and departures is critical. In order to explore how operations can be improved given the dynamics of resource and dema...

The current literature in the rail–truck intermodal transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat) domain ignores congestion at intermodal yards. We attempt to close that gap by proposing a bi-objective optimization framework for managing hazmat freight that not only considers congestion at intermodal yards, but also determines the appropriate equipment capacity. The proposed framework, i.e., a...

Intermodal transportation has experienced a phenomenal growth over the past two decades, and continues to be one of the rapidly growing segments of the transportation industry. This has been attributed to the competitive pressures on global supply chains, the increasing demand for new service patterns driven by ocean carriers as well as the globalization of industry (Szyliowicz, 2003; Stone, 19...

The major driving forces behind the establishment of intermodal facilities include number of jobs that will be created by the facility, freight performance improvement, and other economic benefits to the region. Job creation is the most tangible benefit that stakeholders use to justify the development of such facilities. This project explores different job creation factors for intermodal facili...