The trade-off between CO2 emissions and logistics costs based on multi-objective optimization

This paper develops a decision-support tool for estimating the balanced market shares of given freight transport systems operating in a given network, satisfying both the minimum costs and the Carbon-Dioxide (CO2) emission requirements. Since CO2 constraints in logistics markets need to be realized in the near future, a modal shift in freight transport could be expected to reduce the CO2 emissions within the reasonable cost/time constraints. In order to clarify the relationship between freight costs and CO2 emissions, the technique of multi-objective optimization is used as the core of the decision-support tool. This tool enables the optimal modal market share to be found as well as the optimal trade-off between the costs and the CO2 emissions. The developed tool is applied to a simplified freight transport network connecting two large European ports – the port of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and the port of Gdansk (Poland). The initial solution, based on the minimization of freight costs, shows that the mode share of freight is local/regional freight transport situations, while the other solutions balanced with CO2 emissions shows that the mode share is changed into intermodal freight system, which is based on the ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ network.