A Fixed-penalty Cost and Expected Consequence Approach to Planning and Managing Intermodal Transportation of Hazardous Materials

Intermodal transportation, that combines the desired attributes of two or more transportation modes, has experienced impressive growth over the past three decades. Despite the increasing use of intermodal to move chemicals and other hazardous materials (hazmat), this area has not received as much attention as road transportation. In this work, we present a bi-criteria mathematical model to plan and manage intermodal shipments –of regular and hazardous freight, in the presence of customer specified delivery times and fixed-penalty cost for late shipments. The model is applied to realistic size problem instances generated using the intermodal infrastructure of a North American railroad operator.