Collaborative planning for intermodal transport with eco-label preferences.

Sustainability is a common concern in intermodal transport. Collaboration among carriers may help in reducing emissions. In this context, this work establishes a collaborative planning model for intermodal transport and uses eco-labels (a series of different levels of emission ranges) to reflect shippers' sustainability preferences. A mathematical model and an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search heuristic are proposed for intermodal transport planning of carriers and fuzzy set theory is used to model the preferences towards eco-labels. For multiple carriers, centralized, auction-based collaborative, and non-collaborative planning approaches are proposed and compared. Real data from barge, train and truck carriers in the European Rhine-Alpine corridor is used for extensive experiments where both unimodal carrier collaboration and intermodal carrier collaboration are analyzed. Compared with non-collaborative planning without eco-labels, the number of served requests increases and emissions decrease significantly in the collaborative planning with eco-labels as transport capacity is better utilized. • A conceptual framework for collaborative planning of intermodal transport is proposed. • The eco-label preferences are taken into account to achieve sustainable intermodal transport. • The centralized approach, auction-based collaborative approach, and non-collaborative approaches are proposed and evaluated comparatively. • Two scenarios of collaborative planning, i.e., collaboration among unimodal carriers and collaboration among intermodal carriers, are considered. • Realistic transport networks in the European Rhine-Alpine corridor are used to conduct extensive experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]