Integration of inland waterway transport in the intermodal supply chain: a taxonomy of research challenges

This paper identifies research opportunities which will enable the further integration of inland waterway transport in the intermodal supply chain. Intermodal transport may be interpreted as a chain of actors who supply a transport service. Inland navigation can play a crucial role in increasing supply chain service performance. A first group of research challenges lies in the evolving relationship between transport geography and logistics activities. The next set of research challenges has the objective to encourage efficient operations in IWT: development of a system wide model for IWT, integration of operational planning systems and analysis of bundling networks. A third group of research efforts is directed towards shippers and consignees who use the intermodal transport chain to send or receive their goods: further development of models that integrate intermodal transport decisions with supply chain decisions and creation of green supply chains. A fourth cluster of research challenges concerns the problem domain of external cost calculations. Finally detailed time series data on freight transport should be collected to support these future research tracks

AIRO 2016. 46th Annual Conference of the Italian Operational Research Society. Emerging Advances in Logistics Systems Trieste, September 6-9, 2016 - Abstracts Book

The AIRO 2016 book of abstract collects the contributions from the conference participants. The AIRO 2016 Conference is a special occasion for the Italian Operations Research community, as AIRO annual conferences turn 46th edition in 2016. To reflect this special occasion, the Programme and Organizing Committee, chaired by Walter Ukovich, prepared a high quality Scientific Programme including the first initiative of AIRO Young, the new AIRO poster section that aims to promote the work of students, PhD students, and Postdocs with an interest in Operations Research. The Scientific Programme of the Conference offers a broad spectrum of contributions covering the variety of OR topics and research areas with an emphasis on “Emerging Advances in Logistics Systems”. The event aims at stimulating integration of existing methods and systems, fostering communication amongst different research groups, and laying the foundations for OR integrated research projects in the next decade. Distinct thematic sections follow the AIRO 2016 days starting by initial presentation of the objectives and features of the Conference. In addition three invited internationally known speakers will present Plenary Lectures, by Gianni Di Pillo, Frédéric Semet e Stefan Nickel, gathering AIRO 2016 participants together to offer key presentations on the latest advances and developments in OR’s research

Book of abstracts of the ICIEOM-CIO-IIIE International Conference 2015

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS OF THE ICIEOM-CIO-IIIE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2015: ENGINEERING SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS: The way ahead for industrial engineering and operations managemen

Access management for road hauliers and rail operators in intermodal freight terminals

A pivotal element in the transport industry, intermodal freight transport, is rather complex due to the numerous transport modes and actors involved. Terminal operators in intermodal freight transport face major challenges to provide seamless flows of containers via their terminals. Seamless flows are achievable by bridging gaps between large-scale transport operators (e.g. shipping lines) and small-scale transport operators (e.g. road hauliers and rail operators). Effective access processes can not only bridge those gaps but also contribute to decreasing turnaround times for trucks and trains. By applying the access processes, small-scale transport operators can receive access to specific resources in terminals. An effective access process can be achieved when transport resources (e.g. trucks and truck drivers) can be managed together with terminal resources (e.g. straddle carriers and straddle carrier drivers). In this thesis, such management is termed access management, defined as managing the process by which actors access resources at terminals. Guided by that concept, the thesis seeks to increase the understanding of how access management for road hauliers and rail operators in intermodal freight terminals can contribute to decreasing turnaround times for trucks and trains.The thesis is a compilation of five papers reporting studies that involved literature reviews, interviews, focus groups, participant observations and time measurements. Whereas the literature reviews focused on the topics of access management and information exchange, the collected data were analysed by implementing several analytical frameworks developed for the thesis. The results of using those frameworks clarified how effective access to resources at intermodal freight terminals can be managed, especially by explaining four dynamics: (1) how different information services can contribute to decreasing turnaround times for trucks and trains, (2) how those services can affect activity performance and resource utilisation, (3) how the required and most relevant attributes of information can be exchanged in real time among actors involved and (4) how and when such attributes need to be automatically collected and exchanged. Following from those results, the chief finding is that terminal operators can effectively manage transport and terminal processes, as well as decrease turnaround for trucks and trains, by using access management services that allow exchanging information in real time. From the empirical findings of the studies conducted, six propositions are formulated and justified

The role of operational research in green freight transportation

Recent years have witnessed an increased awareness of the negative external impacts of freight transportation. The field of Operational Research (OR) has, particularly in the recent years, continued to contribute to alleviating the negative impacts through the use of various optimization models and solution techniques. This paper presents the basic principles behind and an overview of the existing body of recent research on ‘greening’ freight transportation using OR-based planning techniques. The particular focus is on studies that have been described for two heavily used modes for transporting freight across the globe, namely road (including urban and electric vehicles) and maritime transportation, although other modes are also briefly discussed

Discrete-Event Control and Optimization of Container Terminal Operations

This thesis discusses the dynamical modeling of complex container terminal operations. In the current literature, the systems are usually modeled in static way using linear programming techniques. This setting does not completely capture the dynamic aspects in the operations, where information about external factors such as ships and trucks arrivals or departures and also the availability of terminal's equipment can always change. We propose dynamical modeling of container terminal operations using discrete-event systems (DES) modeling framework. The basic framework in this thesis is the DES modeling for berth and quay crane allocation problem (BCAP) where the systems are not only dynamic, but also asynchronous. We propose a novel berth and QC allocation method, namely the model predictive allocation (MPA) which is based on model predictive control principle and rolling horizon implementation. The DES models with asynchronous event transition is mathematically analyzed to show the efficacy of our method. We study an optimal input allocation problem for a class of discrete-event systems with dynamic input sequence (DESDIS). We show that in particular, the control input can be obtained by the minimization/maximization of the present input sequence only. We have shown that the proposed approach performed better than the existing method used in the studied terminal and state-of-the-art methods in the literature