Intermodality and Rail Transport: Focus on Port Rail Shunting Operations

The presence of many actors interacting in the intermodal transport where rail modality is involved, causes some inefficiencies and some bottlenecks. These bottlenecks make the intermodal transport rigid and less fluid than the road transport. Operation research approaches can be useful as support for the decision makers in order to improve the process and to favour the development of rail transport. Thus, this work aims at describing the entire rail transport process within the intermodal transport in order to highlight the critical points that can be improved; in particular, both port rail shunting activities, and port rail terminal operations are discussed. A focus on a novel critical aspect never investigated before (at least for the author knowledge) is reported: the port rail shunting re-scheduling problem. A discussion on possible approaches for solving this problem is presented, together with a first approach based on a space-time network.