The efficiency of an intermodal terminal is especially measured in terms of time waste for both traffic feeders and loading units (known as intermodal transport units, ITUs) from the moment they arrive at the terminal up to the leaving instant. This makes significant the estimation of the maximum traffic (normally referred to as “capacity”) which allows the terminal to work without loss of efficiency and congestion. The amount of the factors from which capacity depends and their nature (the most of them are stochastic processes with a huge grade of indeterminacy—e.g. traffic peaks, economical fluctuations, delays and so on) make the issue challenging and seldom addressed from scientific literature. This paper deals with a heuristic model for the estimation of the yearly capacity of an intermodal terminal and is organised as follows. General definitions and a wide dissertation on the complexity of the concept may be found in the Section 1, also briefly summarizing some interesting results of the scientific literature. Section 2 describes the model and the assumptions on which it is based. A mathematical formulation of the described problem is contained in the Section 3. The solution method is widely described in the Section 4 and used in the Section 5 for the capacity estimation of one of the most important Italian terminals (two more examples can be found in Appendix A). An evaluation of the achieved results is drawn in the final section sf the paper.
A heuristic solution for the yearly capacity of an intermodal terminal
NOCERA, SILVIO
2009-01-01
Abstract
The efficiency of an intermodal terminal is especially measured in terms of time waste for both traffic feeders and loading units (known as intermodal transport units, ITUs) from the moment they arrive at the terminal up to the leaving instant. This makes significant the estimation of the maximum traffic (normally referred to as “capacity”) which allows the terminal to work without loss of efficiency and congestion. The amount of the factors from which capacity depends and their nature (the most of them are stochastic processes with a huge grade of indeterminacy—e.g. traffic peaks, economical fluctuations, delays and so on) make the issue challenging and seldom addressed from scientific literature. This paper deals with a heuristic model for the estimation of the yearly capacity of an intermodal terminal and is organised as follows. General definitions and a wide dissertation on the complexity of the concept may be found in the Section 1, also briefly summarizing some interesting results of the scientific literature. Section 2 describes the model and the assumptions on which it is based. A mathematical formulation of the described problem is contained in the Section 3. The solution method is widely described in the Section 4 and used in the Section 5 for the capacity estimation of one of the most important Italian terminals (two more examples can be found in Appendix A). An evaluation of the achieved results is drawn in the final section sf the paper.
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