Solving the Mode Selection Problem with Fixed Transportation Cost in Intermodal Transportation

To organize the intermodal transportation in a more cost-effective way, the problem of selecting the transportation mode in each link along the transportation route of an intermodal shipment was addressed by taking into account the fixed and variable transportation cost simultaneously. Aiming at minimize the total cost including transportation cost, transfer cost, and penalty cost, and taking the shipment delivery time and transportation capacity as constraints, a mixed integer linear programming model was proposed, and a corresponding integer-based encoding genetic algorithm was designed. Computational results show that the proposed model can find much better solutions when compared with the existing model that does not consider the fixed transportation cost. For 15 random instances with 20 to 100 links and 5 to 20 transportation modes, the present algorithm find much better solutions than the commercial optimization solver LINGO within the same computation time of 60 seconds for 2 large-scale instances, achieving an average total cost-saving of 0.75%. This proves the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for large-scale instances.