Abstract
In North-West Europe, the options for intermodal inland transportation of containers are increasing. Inland corridors become increasingly interconnected in hinterland networks. To minimise operating costs, new methods are required that allow integral network operations management. The network operations consist of allocating containers to available inland transportation services, that is, planning. For adequate planning it is important to adapt to occurring disturbances. In this article, a new mathematical model is proposed: the Linear Container Allocation model with Time-restrictions. This model is used for determining the influence of three main types of transit disturbances on network performance: early service departure, late service departure and cancellation of inland services. The influence of a disturbance is measured in two ways. The impact measures the additional cost incurred by an updated planning in case of a disturbance. The relevance measures the cost difference between a fully updated and a locally updated plan. With the results of the analysis, key service properties of disturbed services that result in a high impact or high relevance can be determined. Based on this, the network operator can select focus areas to prevent disturbances with high impact and to improve the planning updates in case of disturbances with high relevance. The proposed method is used in a case study to assess the impact and relevance of transit disturbances on inland services of the European Gateway Services network.
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Acknowledgements
This research is partially supported by the NWO/STW VENI project ‘Intelligent multi-agent control for flexible coordination of transport hubs’ (project 11210) of the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, and by Erasmus Smart Port. ECT and EGS are acknowledged for providing the first author the opportunity to conduct research into the EGS network during an internship, during which they have supplied information as well as data about network costs and transportation demands. This allowed the authors to apply the newly proposed model to a practical case of current container network development. ECT is also acknowledged for participating in the study for this paper with the authors holding independent positions at Erasmus School of Economics and Delft University of Technology (ECT or EGS did not commission the study). We thank the reviewers and editor for their constructive comments and suggestions.
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Appendix A
Appendix A
Network transport cost estimation
Adapted from Van Riessen et al, (2014, Appendix A )
To be able to analyse the transportation in an EGS-type of network, general cost formulas for the transit costs are estimated. Costs reported in this appendix are masked by a confidentiality factor, to protect the confidentiality of the data. The costs for subcontracted transportation are estimated from available EGS cost data as a linear function of the transportation distance d. The results are reported Table A1. These costs are the costs for the transit only, the cost of loading and unloading the container, the transfer costs, apply separately. Table A2 shows the distances to the other terminals from the Delta terminal as an example.
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van Riessen, B., Negenborn, R., Lodewijks, G. et al. Impact and relevance of transit disturbances on planning in intermodal container networks using disturbance cost analysis. Marit Econ Logist 17, 440–463 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/mel.2014.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/mel.2014.27