A receding-horizon planning approach for rail operations in seaport container terminals

Abstract

The increasing importance of environmental and social issues in transportation imposes to focus more and more on strengthening and improving rail transportation. This is even truer for logistics nodes, such as seaports, which represent places where intermodality occurs. The present paper is devoted to model and plan the rail port cycle, at an aggregate level, with the goal of satisfying a given demand of trains outgoing from a generic container terminal. In order to do that, a discrete-time queue-based model resulting in a mixed-integer linear mathematical programming problem has been formulated; moreover, an event-triggered receding-horizon planning scheme has been defined in order to take into account possible disturbances affecting the system. The proposed approach has been applied to a real container terminal located in the Northern Italy coast; the results obtained show the effectiveness of the presented planning framework.