Scheduling for a Single-Terminal Intermodal System Recovery with Poisson Arrivals

This paper studies the recovery of an intermodal freight system from a major disruption and develops a model for optimising vehicle schedules under disrupted conditions. The proposed model optimises the recovery of a single-terminal system with relatively short feeder routes on which vehicle roundtrip times are exponentially distributed and arrivals at the terminal are Poisson-distributed. Mathematical expectations are used to formulate the deterministic equivalent for the scheduling problem and a genetic algorithm is applied to optimise the schedules on main routes. The model developed in this paper can be applied to single-terminal transfer systems with any combination of transportation modes using discrete vehicles, as long as the feeder arrivals do not deviate much from the assumed Poisson distributions. Since its computational time is relatively insensitive to the numbers of vehicles on feeder routes, this model can be used to efficiently optimise intermodal systems with numerous vehicle arrivals.