Institute of Transportation, MOTC

       In international freight transport, the intermodal transfer of maritime and railway transportation is the primary approach to evacuate the large volume of containers delivered in mega ships in many important ports around the world. In this kind of intermodal transportation, the efficient loading of containers to railway trains becomes a critical and challenge task, especially during pandemic period. In this research, we investigate the container loading problem in such intermodal transport and propose an integer programming formulation to make up the shortfall in conventional manual approach. The proposed formulation is solved by a commercial optimization package. The result of experiments show that the proposed formulation can solve problems of realistic size within reasonable computation time. In addition, the sensitivity analysis identifies the critical parameters that have greater impact on the solution efficiency when solving the proposed formulation. The results can be spread among respective stakeholders to draw their attention to this critical problem and their possible exploitation.