Evaluation of interport performances: a state automaton approach

The need for performing freight displacements fitting both the just in time manufacturing technique and low environmental impacts led transportation researchers´ interest to integrated transport chains. Intermodal networks are composed of nodes and links, and their competitiveness, with respect to the road transport, depends on the performances of each network component, and on the whole network organization. This work deals with integrated transportation terminals (i.e., the network nodes), and it presents an interport model, the guidelines of a model-based simulation tool, and a cost function which was purposely drawn to evaluate the terminal performances