Mode choice for the intermodal transportation considering carbon emissions

The intermodal transportation as an effective logistics solution can provide timely and high quality service for customers. Especially with the rapid development of logistics industry, the intermodal transportation is becoming a very common practice in the industry today. The operation cost can be reduced to a great extent if different transportation modes are well connected and synchronized. Most existing research about intermodal transportation optimization focused on minimizing the total logistics cost, and/or maximizing the customer satisfied degree, etc. The impact of carbon emissions by different transportation carriers is seldom considered. However, transportation industry plays an important role for the carbon emissions reduction. Some corresponding rules, such as carbon tax, have been proposed to help reducing the carbon emissions in developed countries. Logistics companies need to balance the profit and the carbon emissions. This paper presents an approach to optimize the choice of transportation modes for intermodal transportation with consideration of carbon emissions. An integer programming model is proposed, of which the objective is to minimize the total cost including both logistics costs and costs related to carbon emissions. The computational results are also presented to illustrate the impact of considering carbon emissions on intermodal transportation.