Empty Container Management in the Benelux Waterways

The scientific contribution of this paper is the development of a model for empty container management in the hinterlands of the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the total operational cost while satisfying the demand for empty containers. This goal is achieved by choosing the most efficient transportation mode between a seaport and its hinterland: road, inland waterways or intermodal transport. Moreover, to fit the real-life operation and management as well as possible, our model also includes container substitution and container leasing options.Peer reviewe

Rail-Road terminal locations: aggregation errors and best potential locations on large networks

In network location problems, the number of potential locations is often too large in order to find a solution in a reasonable computing time. That is why aggregation techniques are often used to reduce the number of nodes. This reduction of the size of the location problems makes them more computationally tractable, but aggregation introduces errors into the solutions. Some of these errors will be estimated in this paper. A method that helps to isolate the best potential locations for rail-road terminals embedded in a hub-and-spoke network will further be outlined. Hub location problems arise when it is desirable to consolidate flows at certain locations called hubs. The basic idea is to use the flows of commodities and their geographic spreading as input to determine a set of potential locations for hub terminals. The exercise will be done for the trans-European networks. These potential locations can then further be used as input by an optimal location method

Three dimensional Bin Packing Problem applied to air transport

Packing boxes into containers is a daily process in many di erent elds and especially in transport. However, the particular case of air transport brings some new constraints such as the stability or the fragility of the cargo. The distribution of the weight has also to be considered. Moreover, this special case also brings some data such as the dimensions of the possible containers, called Unit Load Devices. This paper is concerned with the formulation of the three dimensional palletization which includes the main constraints met in the air cargo industry. It proposes a integer linear program for this combinatorial optimization problem

Road and intermodal transport performance: the impact of operational costs and air pollution external costs

peer reviewedThe transportation of goods is essential for the economy, but it also contributes to air pollution which, in turn, affects human health. These negative impacts generate additional costs for society that are not necessarily taken into account in public transportation policies and in private transportation decisions of companies and individuals. This leads to inefficient transportation systems where the social equilibrium is not reached. Intermodal transport is promoted by the European Commission to reduce these negative externalities. The objective of this paper is to analyze at a strategic level the effect on modal split between road, intermodal rail and intermodal inland waterway transport of several economic or environmental policies. An intermodal allocation model is applied to the Belgian case in order to identify the modal split changes between the single minimization of costs (operational or health-related external) and the introduction of additional road taxes

The sensitivity of optimal rail‐road terminal locations to intermodal freight costs variations

In the last decades, the market of goods became globalized, increasing international trade relations and the demand for long distance transportation. As a consequence of the larger distances traveled and of the containerization of goods, maritime transportation became more efficient and reliable. In the hinterland, intermodal (rail-road) freight transportation emerged as a competitive alternative to truck-only transportation. In one of its possible meanings, intermodal freight transportation is the multimodal chain of container-transportation services [1] that, e.g., brings containers from (or to) the seaport by barge or rail to (or from) an intermodal terminal in the hinterland from where they are shipped by truck to their final destination (or origin). This study focus on inland intermodal freight transport, in particular, on the rail–truck transport of cargo containers in Belgium. This European country has a long rail system and in the last years has readapted this system in order to handle with containerized cargo. Since 2004, some rail-road terminals have been built and new intermodal services between the seaports of Belgium have been established. In addition, with the aim of promoting the modal share of intermodal rail-road transport, the federal government of Belgium started subsidizing part of the rail transport cost and of the transshipments costs at the rail-road terminals. With these investments the intermodal freight flows in Belgium have increased

City logistics and smart delivery

The current and expected growing number of people living and working in cities and the limited space available inside city centres implies a greater exchange of inbound and outbound freight flows between city centres and their surrounding regions. Urban freight transports provide economic benefits to society but are also responsible for negative externalities such as congestion, air and water pollution, climate change, accidents and noise. Access restrictions are one of the most applied measures to control urban traffics in the city's specific areas. A growing use of urban trucks based on electric, hydrogen and hybrid technologies or non-motorized transport such as bikes reduces pollutant emissions, noise and road congestion by making night deliveries and avoiding morning and afternoon peak periods. This seminar's objective is to discuss how to efficiently distribute shipments to customers from several cities by a freight transport operator. This delivery company has several vehicles to carry products to customers or small depots located at different cities' points. We consider the whole distribution network, allowing us to make decisions at firm, delivering companies and small depots level (Aguayo et al., 2020). Then we consider a platform bringing together several freight transport operators. Freight bundling is a central characteristic of the systems in focus. Besides, pricing decisions can be simultaneously integrated by extending a bilevel programming formulation (Tawfik and Limbourg, 2019). Finally, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, which is also known as a drone, is examined as a possible way to facilitate biomedical transportation. We deal with the drone network design problem for biomedical material transportation. Four location models are developed and applied to Brussels and its periphery with respect to the associated market in terms of biomedical product flows. In the context of separate case studies of scenario-based analysis, the experiments show that charging stations is useful for extending the mission ranges and gaining market share. The results also show the possibility of gradually implementing the bases without requiring any significant changes, such as closing a base (Dhote and Limbourg, 2020)

A relax-and- fix heuristic for the three-dimensional bin-packing model with transportation constraints

peer reviewe

La logistique collaborative

L'objectif d’une logistique collaborative et coopérative est de générer conjointement un profit en mettant en commun les ressources, en partageant et en tirant parti des forces et des capacités spécifiques des entreprises participantes

Inland intermodal freight transport modelling

peer reviewedThe demand for goods has grown in the past decades, in such a way that today freight transport has become essential for the support of modern economies. The search for a competitive freight transport system, able to cope with the growing freight flows, has lead in the last decades to large investments in intermodal transport options, mainly in Europe and North America. Intermodal freight transport is the movement of goods done with the same loading unit (or vehicle) by successive modes of transport, without handling the goods themselves when changing the modes. This paper focus on inland intermodal freight transport, in particular, on the rail?truck transport of cargo containers in Belgium. The work aims to discuss the strategic decision of locating the rail-truck intermodal terminals in Belgium, in which freight can change between modes, while tacking into account the containerized cargo flows between the seaports of Belgium (Antwerp, Zeebruge, Ghent, and Ostend), the main generation centres in Belgium, and the generation centres at the border regions of neighbouring countries. The competitiveness of rail-truck networks in comparison of truck-only is discussed, in particular, for a relative small country as Belgium