Inter-modal freight terminal location in Europe: a strategic model

The political pressure in favour of multi- and inter-modal transport has oriented the focus on sustainable transport solutions. Inter-modal transport is one of the possible solutions, but its efficiency strongly depends on the places where the container terminals are located. The number of possible locations on large scale networks becomes rapidly too large to be taken as input by exact location methods. That’s why the first goal of this paper is to outline a method that helps to identify the best potential locations out of the thousands of potential nodes. The basic idea is to use the flows of commodities and their geographic spreading as input to determine a set of good potential locations for transfer inter-modal terminals. This set can, in a second step, be used as input for already well known optimal location models in order to identify the optimal locations for container terminals in Europe. The methodology is illustrated over the whole trans-European networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results: the model predicts a reduction of the total transportation costs on the network and a modal shift from road to rail. It also evaluates the new modal shift and other indicators.