Title: Service network design and pricing for intermodal freight transport
Abstract: Intermodal freight transport has recently acquired a rightful position as an ecological choice and provided signi cant opportunities to generate economies of scale. Nevertheless, both the quality of its services and their corresponding prices have so far failed to attract the desired customer levels ; a concern supported by the recent EU modal split gures. This obviously a ects the critical market position of intermodal transport and, consequently, the target EU policies of modal shift in its favor. In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously selecting the intermodal freight services to operate during a certain planning period and determining their associated tari s perceived by the clients. To our knowledge, joint pricing and service network design problems are intrinsically poorly investigated in the literature, much less in the domain of intermodal transport. The decisions are tackled from the perspective of a typical intermodal operator ; a service provider operating on a rail-inland waterways (IWWs)-road network. The problem belongs to the tactical decision horizon, regarding the underlying network infrastructure as xed. Furthermore, a simple case of a monopoly is assumed as well as no price or service change reactions from the only competitors : trucking companies. A key design question in this problem is indeed to model the demand volumes of the services in question. For this speci c issue, the bilevel progamming framework is decided upon ; a concept scarcely utilized in intermodal transport-related topics, though powerful in hierarchical and non-cooperative decision schemes. On the higher level, an intermodal operator seeks to maximize his pro t through service design and pricing decisions, while on the lower level, the target customers seek to maximize their utility through service choice decisions between the o ered intermodal and the already existing trucking services. In order to steadily approach the problem, we start by modeling the higher level as a static service network design problem, while xing the demand levels and, consequently, omitting the pricing decisions at this stage. The presented problem involves two types of decisions : the frequencies of the services to be o ered and the routing of the demands, expressed as itineraries, throughout the service network. A mixed integer mathematical program is considered for that purpose in the interest of operating costs' minimization ; a reasonable primary
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot