Intermodal transportation

There is no simple, direct definition for Intermodal transportation. The term is many things to many people, from dedicated-rail services to move massive quantities of containers and trailers over long distances to national planning, from airport operation planning to defining transportation policy for the European Community. And much more. And thus, to fit within the allocated time, we limit the scope of this presentation to the transportation of cargo using containers. The goal is to examine hopw container-based transportation fits within the broad context of freight transportation, to identify a number of issues related to the planing and operations of carriers and intermodal facilities involved in container transportation, and to review the state-of-the-art in Operatations Research models and methods dedicated to these issues.

Teodor Gabriel Crainic is Professor of Operations Research in the Dept. of Management and Technology of the Université du Québec à Montréal, and adjunct Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science and Operations Research of the Université de Montréal and the Dept. of Quantitative Logistics of Molde College, Norway. His research interests are in operations research models, exact and metaheuristic methods, and planning tools applied to transportation, logistics, e-business, and telecommunications, as well as the study of parallel computing and its impact on the design of models and algorithms. He has authored or coauthored over one hundred scientific articles and coauthored STAN, a method and interactive-graphic software for strategic planning of multimodal multicommodity transportation systems used in over 30 organizations in 16 countries. Dr. Crainic co-founded the TRISTAN (TRienial Symposium on Transportation Analysis) and Odysseus (Freight Transportation and Logistics) series of international meetings and served as Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (Montréal), president of the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS, and Associate Editor for Operations Research. He is North American Editor of the International Journal of Mathematical Algorithms, Area Editor for the Journal of Heuristics, and serves on the editorial boards of several other operations research and transportation journals.