Planification stratégique de Systèmes de transport de marchandises en Europe : Modèles de localisations optimales de hubs de conteneurs sur un réseau multimodal

There is a growing imbalance between modes of transport in the European Union. The increasing success of road results in an ever worsening congestion, more environmental nuisances and accidents. That’s why one of the objectives of the European Common Transport Policy is to restore the balance between modes of transport and to develop intermodality.
Among the various types of intermodal transport this doctoral dissertation is concerned by rail-road combined transport for which the terminals are embedded in a hub-and-spoke network. This kind of topology can reduce the transportation costs by consolidations at the hubs.
The proposed method uses the flows of commodities and their geographic spreading as input to determine a set of good potential locations for transfer container terminals. This set can further be used as input for an iterative procedure based on both the p-HMP and the multi-modal assignment in order to identify the optimal locations for such terminals in Europe. This procedure takes into account the variation of the transshipment cost according to the number of containers that could be transshipped.