The design and management of global supply chains are nowadays one of the most active research topics in global logistics and intermodal logistic has developed into a significant sector of the transport logistics in its own right while very little is known about costs in the intermodal chain or appropriate calculation methods. In realistic, the transport volume increase gloriously in the past 30 years in EU and the cost of transportation covers the majority part of the entire supply chain. So it is necessary for us to build a model to aid in the calculation of transportation cost and mode selection between different transportation choices. As the concept of supply chain management is becoming more and more important in addressing an organizations environmental impacts, increasingly environmental and social aspects are being incorporated into supply chain management. Customers are not only influenced by the costs, speeds and reliabilities of supply chain, but also by the perceived environmental impact of each activity. Considering all of these, the integration of transportation models and environmental impacts has become an interesting and crucial domain for exploration. Most of the models of the integration of production and transportation are presented for reducing the transportation costs and choosing the route more economic in the assurance of delivery time. In the paper Creating a Green Supply Chain (Khoo et al., Greener Management International, vol.35, pp.71-88,2002), the author propose a model of green supply chain by integrating the concerns of transport pollution, marketing costs, time to market, recycling of scrap metal and energy conservation. Besides, there is little work until nowadays taking all kinds of transportation into account. In our study, we build a model integrating the conflicting factors such as cost, on-time service and risk and the environmental impacts within the framework of intermodal logistics to aid the decision of the most effective transportation mode choice or mix between freight, rail, boat and airways. This model is attributed to integrate a set of constraints of each transport company. So a supplier would be able to calculate with the model we offered and make his decision of the most effective transportation mode choice or mix according to his own object: minimisation of the transportation cost, the transport duration or the environmental impacts. Simulation and modelling tools are introduced to aid in the decision making process of distance selections and choices of transportation. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.
Abstract