Role of Cargo Weight and Volume: Minimizing Costs and CO2 Emissions in Container Transport

The container revolution has resulted in major changes in international trade and it is the one of the most important contributions to the globalization of the world economy. In addition to an increased coordination and cooperation between different forms of transport, containerization offers benefits in form of direct effects on cost-reduction and acceleration of the “door to door” cargo distribution process, which is of crucial importance to transport users. In a constant exchange of goods between buyers and sellers around the world, goods of various type and different size and weight are transported. In most logistics systems, minimization of costs has always been the main objective. This paper departs from the previous approaches and includes the study of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, taking into consideration the beneficial impact of their reduction and quality analysis on sustainability of ecosystems. A bi-objective mathematical model is proposed, aimed at minimizing container transportation costs and CO2 emissions. This paper analyzes an intermodal transportation chain, based on the import-way and composed of two legs. The intermodal transportation network is composed of three categories of nodes—origin port, gateway ports and destination, and two link categories—maritime and inland. Furthermore, the inclusion of additional objectives into the model enables obtaining more accurate information of the observed objects. The transportation costs were considered for each of the most-commonly used types of containers in container transport, depending on different cargo volume and weight. The total CO2 emissions include ocean transport emissions from container ships and land emissions produced by truck and rail. The model was programmed in MATLAB. The bi-objective optimization has been analyzed by use of different carbon footprint factors for different modes of transport. The developed mathematical model offers a broad range of possible solutions and provides a possibility of their ranking and selecting the most optimal solution, with respect to minimization of transportation costs and CO2 emissions. The advantage of this model is its broad applicability to various ‘point to point’ relations, in which containers are transported by combination of sea and land. The model application enables obtaining adequate and reliable solutions to the observed problem. The combination of the modelling approach and the methods used is novel and with appropriate input parameters enables accurate results in logistic networks.