Mejoras en el transporte intermodaloptimización en tiempo real del acarreo terrestre

Resum

Road transport has always been prevalent in the movement of freight. However, the increasing road congestion and the necessity to find more sustainable means of transport have encouraged different governments to promote intermodality as an alternative. This combines the cost effectiveness of railways or ships with the flexibility of trucks. However, intermodal transport has several difficulties to overcome in order to become viable. One of them is a high fixed cost, which is why intermodality is unsuitable for trips shorter than a certain threshold distance. In an intermodal transport chain, the initial and final trips, also called drayage operations, represent 40 % of total transport costs. The proper planning of drayage operations has the potential to reduce the threshold distance, thus it raises the viability of intermodal transport. The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organization of drayage movements; the main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. This scheduling has traditionally been done once a day and, under these conditions, any unexpected event could cause timetable delays. This thesis proposes to use the real-time knowledge about vehicle position to solve this problem, which permanently allows the planner to reassign tasks in case the problem conditions change. This exact knowledge of the position of the vehicles is possible due to the use of a geographic positioning system by satellite (GPS, Galileo, Glonass). The results show that these additional data can be used to dynamically improve the solution.