Optimal location of inter-modal terminals

The optimal location of a facility is a rather complex task that was already studied many times. Several optimal location problems and solution exists, but only a few can be applied to the location of multimodal freight terminals.

Among the possible approaches, if theoretical solutions can be found in the literature, the computational complexity of the proposed methods make them impossible to be applied to real world large geographical networks. Indeed, many of them are based on linear programming, for which the number of constraints drastically increases with the number of terminals to take into account.

This paper identifies the possible existing theoretical exact solutions and the framework of a new approach, in which the initial set of potential terminals is computed by means of the results obtained by the assignment of the flows of commodities on the trans-European network.