A ship-truck intermodal transportation problem

This article focuses on an intermodal freight transport service in which containers represent the moved loading units. In particular, it deals with the advantages of combining sea and road transportation – sea for transferring large quantities over long distances, road for collecting and distributing over short or medium distances. With a view to minimizing the total cost of the service, we formulate a ship-truck intermodal transportation problem as a Travelling Purchaser Problem (TPP), in this way broadening the real-world applications field of the TPP. To tackle this problem, a heuristic algorithm is presented and experimentally tested. Computational results indicate that the algorithm is very efficient on a set of benchmark instances, quickly achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions.