Performance indicators for planning intermodal barge transportation systems

Various indicators are used to qualify the performance of intermodal transportation systems. Some of these are found in public documents, usually providing global measures such as total flow volumes, profits, and share values. While of great interest, such measures are not sufficient to support a fine analysis of different operation strategies, commercial policies, and planning methods. Additional measures are used in the scientific literature to address these issues. Our first goal is to review the performance indicators found in scientific literature and to qualify them with respect to tactical planning of intermodal barge transportation systems. We extend this analysis to include revenue management policies, a topic generally neglected in freight transportation. We also discuss procedures to generate problem instances that provide the means to analyze planning methods and system behavior based on these performance indicators. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.