Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 5666: Collaborative Fleet Deployment and Routing for Sustainable Transport (Sustainability)

Efficient multi-modal transportation in the hinterland of seaport terminals dependson consolidation of container volumes in support of frequent services of high capacity means oftransport, such that sustainable multi-modal transport can compete with uni-modal road transportin cost and time. The tactical design of barge scheduled transport services involves fleet selectionand routing through the inland waterway network. The resulting network service design shouldmeet expected demand and service time requirements set by the shippers. We develop a tightMILP formulation for the Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing (FSMVRP) especially adapted for thePort-Hinterland multi-modal barge network design. Also, an analytical model is developed to helpunderstand important design trade-offs made. We consider the case of horizontal cooperation of dryport container terminals that share capacity. Our results show that in case of cooperation, both costsavings and service levels are improved, and allow for sustainable multi-modal transport to becompetitive with uni-modal truck transport.