Real-time control of freight forwarder transportation networks by integrating multimodal transport chains

Western European freight forwarders are continually being forced to increase the efficiency of their transportation processes because of the liberalization and deregulation of the European transport market. This paper proposes a new real-time-oriented control approach in order to expand load consolidation, reduce empty vehicle trips, and handle dynamic disturbances. This approach integrates multimodal transportation and multiple transshipments for the first time. Thus, it enables the flexible generation and adaptation of transportation processes. In order to be able to handle occurring disturbances, an optimization procedure that adapts the transportation processes is continually applied. Vehicle breakdowns or deceleration of vehicles, traffic congestion, and street blockages are integrated as possible disturbance scenarios. At the same time, dynamically incoming transportation requests are also dealt with. Moreover, cooperative agreements between freight forwarders, which are gaining increasing importance, are integrated by mapping hubs and external services. The efficiency of the new real-time approach is validated by several computational experiments. In particular, the use of the entire execution time for plan adaptation as well as the integration of multiple transshipments has shown promising results.