A road rail PI hub allocation problem: Heuristic in static and dynamic case

In this paper a new road-rail terminal design called road-rail PI hub is adapted to the usual challenges of the intermodal transport which are time and cost. This research aims to find the “best” allocation of containers in a rail-road PI hub where a set of containers must be transferred from railcars to outgoing trucks using the sorters. The main goal is to minimize the used number of trucks. To achieve this, heuristic approach in static and dynamic case is proposed. Then results are compared to the upper bound and the FIFO method. The experimental results show that the proposed heuristic gives better results compared to the solution generated by FIFO;