Road-Railway Transport Route Optimization Considering Market Changes and Time Costs

The customer demands for logistics service quality have seen great increase and the new development dynamic with the domestic economy and international engagement reinforcing each other has already been formed. Against such a background, it is of crucial significance to figure out how to arrange transport routes reasonably and reduce transport costs for highway-railway intermodal transport. In this study, the routes of highway-railway intermodal transport were chosen as the optimization object. A road-railway transport route optimization model targeting at the minimum total cost was constructed based on the influences of market changes on customer demands, time cost of transport and reloading cost at nodes. Moreover, a double-layer array chromosome genetic algorithm was designed to solve the model. Subsequently, a field simulation was carried out in the surrounding areas of the intersection between the Jiaozuo-Liuzhou Line and the Lanzhou-Lianyungang Line. Besides, specific suggestions for scheme and road maps were proposed in this study for intermodal transport enterprises. The scheme offered herein reduced the total cost by 36.04
^%
compared with the current scheme of project, thus fully demonstrating the performance of the model proposed in the study. Finally, comparison and analysis were conducted between the double-layer array chromosome genetic algorithm and the traditional genetic algorithm, and then it has been found out that the total cost of the former was less than that of the latter by 10.56%, which verifies the performance of the algorithm proposed in this study.