Tabu Search Algorithm to Solve the Intermodal Terminal Location Problem

Establishment of appropriate terminals is effective as the main gate entrance to international, national and local transportation network for economic performance, traffic safety and reduction of environmental pollution. This paper focuses on intermodal terminal location problem. The main objective of this problem is to determine which of the terminals of a set of candidate terminals should be opened such that the total cost be minimized. In this problem, demands of customers will ship directly (without the use of terminals) between the origin and destination of customers, or intermodaly (by using two terminals) or even by combination of both methods. Since this problem is NP-hard, metaheuristics algorithms such as tabu search (TS) is used to solve it. The algorithm is compared with greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) on instance of this problem. Results show the efficiency of TS in comparision with GRASP.