Determining the Freight Volumes for a Decentralized Waterborne Container Transportation Service

In order to establish a new decentralized waterborne container transportation service, both the supply side and the demand side need to be examined. With respect to the demand side, the expected freight volume is the major indicator of the extent of the demand. The designated service area of the new transportation service is examined for the container volume per municipality which is eligible and available for the new service. The determined municipal volumes are then to be assigned to the nodes of the transportation network. Since the network consists of two kind of nodes, origin ports and destination ports, the assignment process takes place in two steps. First, the municipal container volumes are assigned to the origin ports. Subsequently, these volumes are then allotted to the destination ports. Whereas many projects and initiatives carry out the assignment manually, the present work applies a set of predetermined assignment rules. With the help of these rules, similar problems can be solved in a comparable manner. Thereby, various logistics service concepts can be compared with each other in a more informative way.