Title: Assess economic and environmental trade-off for inland port location

Authors: Zheng Chang; Jinxian Weng; Zhuang Qi; Dong Yang

Addresses: Transportation Engineering College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China ' College of Transport and Communications, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China ' Navigation College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China ' Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, Faculty of Business, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Abstract: This paper proposes a multi-objective optimisation model to study the inland port location in a multimodal hinterland freight network. The model takes the different preferences of various stakeholders into consideration through minimising the transportation cost for shippers, the fixed cost of inland port operator and the CO₂ emissions for community simultaneously. A NSGA II- solution algorithm is applied to find the Pareto optimal solutions for the multi-objective optimisation model we built. A case study using actual data is conducted to validate the model and the solution method in the end. The empirical results indicate that in most cases the transportation cost and emissions decrease when more inland ports are constructed, but this is not conclusive, in few cases we find more inland ports lead to increased transportation cost. Furthermore, the construction of inland ports generates greater relative gains in environment than that in shippers' economic benefit.

Keywords: inland port; facility location; multi-objective optimisation; CO₂ emissions; mixed-integer linear programming; hinterland freight network; capacity choice; value of time; containerised transportation; China.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2019.099277

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2019 Vol.11 No.2/3, pp.243 - 261

Received: 01 Sep 2017
Accepted: 03 Apr 2018
Published online: 24 Apr 2019 *

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