Modelling and solving a bi-objective intermodal transport problem of agricultural products

Abstract

During the past few years, transportation of agricultural products is increasingly becoming a crucial problem in supply chain logistics. In this paper, we present a new mathematical formulation and two solution approaches for an intermodal transportation problem. The proposed bi-objective model is applied to the transportation of agricultural products from Morocco to Europe to minimise both the transportation cost either in the form of uni-modal or intermodal, as well as the maximal overtime to delivery products. The first solution approach is based on a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm improved by a local search heuristic and the second one is the GRASP algorithm (Greedy Randomised Adaptive Search Procedure) with iterated local search heuristics. They are tested on theoretical and real case benchmark instances and compared with the standard NSGA-II. Results are analysed and the efficiency of algorithms is discussed using some performance metrics.

Keywords

• Intermodal transportation
• Agricultural products export
• Bi-objective optimization
• NSGA-II
• GRASP Algorithm
• Iterated local search