Assessing the Economic and Environmental Effects of Dry Port and Triangulation Transport on the Empty Container Repositioning Problem - A Case of Inland Container Transport System in Sweden

Abstract

Abstract: The hinterland container transportation chain is an extension of maritime freight transport, which is necessary and also generated extensive emissions and costs. Additionally, the movement of empty containers accounted for a significant share of these costs, which can be regarded as waste. Two of these solutions for this problem are: 1) using the dry port to convert part of the road transport into railway; 2) applying the triangulation transport to reduce the movements of empty containers - the dry port can store the empty containers and transport them to the consignors from there. In this thesis, we focus on a case in Sweden, building three simulation models (one with the dry port, one without the dry port, and the other one with the dry port and triangulation) to evaluate the economic and environmental effects of the dry port and triangulation transport on the inland container transportation network, especially the empty container repositioning (ECR) process. The result shows that the dry port can help reduce the transport costs by 66.36% and CO2 emissions by 78.86% for the whole system. Moreover, the triangulation transport method can not only push the reduction further (25.12% for cost and 7.85% for emissions) based on the dry port solution, but also can reduce the share from empty container movements. The main contribution of this study is the improvement of the simulation methods (agent-based discrete-event simulation) and parameters setting (stochastic).