Revenue-driven dynamic pricing and operational planning in multimodal freight transportation

Multimodal freight transport developed in the transportation sector as an alternative to unimodal transport faced with the challenges brought by the growing global demand for transporting goods. Multimodal transport is the transportation of goods using at least two modes of transport, usually door-to-door. The common transport modes include railways, maritime routes, and the roads. Multimodal transport network has an inherently complex structure with numerous stakeholders. Sea-rail multimodal freight transportation is an environmentally sustainable transport chain against road transportation; however, this environmental impact should be considered together with economic aspects in order to make multimodality more competitive in the sector. This thesis first provides a taxonomic review of multimodal transportation literature enumerating its components: data, demand, cost and time management, modal shift, collaboration, sustainability, governmental policy-setting, operational planning and modeling, revenue management and joint optimization of slot allocation and pricing strategies. Next, it proposes a dynamic pricing approach against fixed pricing to increase the revenue of multimodal transport providers. For slot allocation and cost component of dynamic pricing equation, a time-space diagram is developed to include time dimension and the sea-rail multimodal freight transportation problem is formulated as a linear network flow model. Thus, this study of operational planning and dynamic pricing strategy from multimodal transport provider's perspective provides managerial insights on the advantages of multimodality