Opportunities for OR in intermodal freight transport research: A review

Intermodal transport reflects the combination of at least two modes of transport in a single transport chain, without a change of container for the goods, with most of the route traveled by rail, inland waterway or ocean-going vessel, and with the shortest possible initial and final journeys. Operational research has focused mostly on transport problems of uni-modal transport modes. We argue that intermodal freight transportation research is emerging as a new transportation research application field, that it still is in a pre-paradigmatic phase, and that it needs a different type of models than those applied to uni-modal transport. In this paper, a review is given of the operational research models that are currently used in this emerging field and the modelling problems, which need to be addressed.