Robust optimisation of the intermodal freight transport problem: Modeling and solving with an efficient hybrid approach

In the present paper, we propose robust optimisation models for the intermodal freight transport problem for dealing with uncertainties in using costs, and the capacities of terminals and uncertainties in transportation costs. Moreover, we propose two solution approaches for efficiently solving the problem. The first one is a population-based simulated annealing (PBSA) with heuristics. The second one is a hybrid solution approach combining the PBSA with an exact method. In addition to a theoretical study of randomly-generated instances, a real network is addressed for testing the performance of the proposed methods and models and analysing the impact of robustness. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.