An integrated approach to sustainable multimodal transportation in logistics networks

Nowadays, in networked production environments and globalized economy an efficient, high quality and sustainable freight transport represents a crucial challenge. In this context, intermodality can reduce the environmental and social impacts of transportation operations. The optimal balance between environmental, energy and competitiveness issues requires to analyse and manage in an integrated way the peculiarities related to the long-haul and short-haul freight transportation. The paper is focused on freight transportation planning of logistics platforms in a multimodal network. A logistics operator has to manage a set of long-distance freight shipments while scheduling pickup and delivery operations in short-haul networks, and forwarding operations in the multimodal network. We consider a decision maker coordinating logistics platforms while optimizing their transportation plans on a fixed time horizon. The paper presents a mathematical formulation of the overall problem taking into account multimodality and sustainability in the long-haul network, and routing constraints in the short-haul network.