A Survey of Logistics Problems Occurring in Container Transportation.

Abstract : This paper serves as an introduction to the types of operational problems that arise in the intermodal environment. We examine and describe problems from a wide range of topics including stowage of containers on both ship and rail, routing and scheduling of vehicles, routing of shipments on existing transportation networks, equipment management, and network design. It has become clear that the problems described here are inherently complex. In fact, for many of these problems, simply finding a feasible solution is not trivial. For selected problems, we have included initial research toward providing algorithmic solutions.