Multimodal freight transportation with ship chartering

In this article, we present a mathematical model that finds the optimal multimodal freight transportation plan for manufacturing companies during a planning horizon. The model considers road and sea transportation options. The sea transportation requires chartering at least one ship among candidate ships. The chartered ships operate on several predefined routes during the planning horizon. We apply the mathematical model to a company, which currently delivers finished goods to customers via road and is considering the option of using multimodal transportation. The company plans to charter ships on an annual basis and operate them among domestic ports. We use real data regarding the ships (capacity, speed, stowage, costs), ports (capacities, loading/unloading rates, handling costs) and trucks (costs). We perform a sensitivity analysis based on several cases, and observe that the proposed plan does not change up to moderate levels of changes in the data.