Intermodal freight transportation in humanitarian logistics

Intermodal freight transportation is used heavily in commercial logistics around the world. On the other hand, in humanitarian logistics, it is not considered as the primary solution. Transportation resilience during response phase is an important performance criterion for humanitarian logistics and it mostly depends on the availability of the modes used for transporting relief items. Previous studies brought multi-modal or multi-vehicle transportation to forefront. Intermodal freight transportation is not focused from a perspective of resilience in humanitarian logistics. This study aims to highlight the differences between intermodal transportation and multi-modal transportation and to present a resilient transportation system without handling of relief items. Two integer programming models are developed based on a time-space network by considering route and vehicle availabilities changing dynamically over a specified time horizon. In these models, different types of vehicles and different capacities of unit loading device and intermodal transportation unit are considered, namely, truck (highway), freight train (railway), vessel (seaway), plane (airway) and helicopter (airway). This study proposes a unit loading device for humanitarian logistics that is compatible with different transportation modes. The first model includes an integer variable representation for vehicle fleets of different transportation modes. It can be concluded that the second model includes an index representation of individual vehicles for different transportation modes. The first mathematical model with integer variable representation of vehicle fleets is more effective than the second one. Five real life scenarios are fed into these mathematical models and the results are compared. The results of the experimental study show that intermodal transportation provides better humanitarian response in terms of resilience.