Optimization on Combination of Transport Routes and Modes on Dynamic Programming for a Container Multimodal Transport System

Along with the swift boom of the carriage of container and logistic economy, multimodal transport becomes more and more important economically. Container multimodal transport is a form of combined transport organization aimed to optimize the overall cargo transport. The optimal organization of various transport modes in container multimodal transport system directly concern the time, cost and quality of the cargo transport. In order to describe the optimal organization problem, an optimization model based on dynamic programming is presented in the paper, and is satisfied with reality constraints. Then, a dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal combination strategy of transport modes. Finally, an empirical study is used to show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed model. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.