The best and most promising intermodal freight rail and barge networks, given new opportunities for designing networks, are identified. These opportunities have arisen because of numerous attempts at the end of the 20th century to introduce innovations in intermodal transport rapidly and to achieve a quality leap--a substantial improvement in the quality-cost ratio. The total effect had the appearance of an innovation wave. Most visible in Europe were hardware expressions such as new types of terminals, trains, barges, and storage and transport systems. Despite the low speed of implementation, achievement of a new level of effectiveness and efficiency of load unit exchange at nodes and link operations is expected. That would imply new conditions for network design. Thus, less promising networks could be improved, and some existing models would be superseded. An important aspect of this reorientation is the choice of bundling concepts by train and barge operators. Beginning with the expectation of new opportunities, an analysis will be done of networks innovative in the method of bundling flows and by realizing short load unit exchange times at nodes. The focus will be on the relationship between important bundling characteristics--network volumes, transport frequencies, scale of transport, and network layout. A typology of bundling concepts, mathematical formulation of bundling effects and, for rail transport, results of performance and cost calculations are presented. One result is that, given one daily service on each transport relationship, hub-and-spoke concepts have the lowest main modality costs for networks with medium-sized flows, and line concepts have the lowest for networks with small flows.
Abstract