An analysis of intermodal transportation corridors in terms of sustainable transportation

ABSTRACT Through the Brundtland Report, it is an important aim for freight and passenger transport to be designed with high economic, social and low environmental impact. The seventeen sustainability objectives set by the United Nations for a more livable world in 2030 is required to establish a series of policies for sustainable transport systems. In order to strengthen these existing policies, the selection of sustainable routes in freight transport has a great of importance. The main purpose of this study is to design an intermodal transportation system that will provide the selection of the most cost effective route with the lowest environmental impact and the highest social contribution by considering the sustainability performances of alternative freight transport routes through an origin and a destination point. In accordance with this purpose, a decision support system has been developed which includes three basic stages. In the first stage of the decision support system, the importance level of sustainable intermodal transportation indicators, identified in the preliminary research stage of the study, required to measure the sustainability performance of the intermodal transportation system has been determined. In the second stage, after having determined the alternative routes, economic performance, environmental impact performance and social performance of the routes have been measured by means of cost-transit time method, risk analysis, emission calculator, safety and security analyses, respectively. The last stage is based on the selection of the most appropriate route among alternatives through an optimization method that can achieve the economic, environmental and social targets within the user constraints. In order to prove the applicability of the proposed decision support system, a problem of transporting from İzmir-Turkey to Lodz-Poland has been focused. In handling this problem, alternative routes have been evaluated and the best routes have been determined in terms of economic, economic-environmental and economic-environmental-social performances, taking into consideration the importance to sustainability indicators considered by the relevant decision makers and the constrains of the system whose values are determined by the relevant decision makers. The results obtained from the application show that the decision support system can be applied between different origins and destinations with the support of a wide route database. Keywords: Intermodal transportation, sustainable transport, route selection, multi-criteria decision making, optimization, zero-one goal programming