| In intermodal rail-truck freight transportation, hub city operations are key to the efficiency of the system. Inefficiencies often arise due to poor planning or coordination among various stakeholders. Drayage operations, terminal operations and traffic management are the three major elements in hub city freight operations, which are closely related. For example, inefficient drayage operations create unnecessary empty truck trips, aggravating traffic congestion and terminal congestion. In the same manner, train arrivals and departures during peak hours often create increased truck traffic that further exacerbates congestion problem.; In this dissertation, a framework is developed to model hub city intermodal freight operations and their complex interactions. The model ensures that drayage operations can be considered along with traffic congestion management and terminal operations within a single integrated framework. Three key models are incorporated in this framework, namely, a truck dispatching (drayage) model, a traffic assignment model, and a terminal simulation model.; The contributions of this dissertation are: (i) the overall framework design; (ii) an efficient heuristic for truck dispatching problems with varying travel times; and (iii) a truck-car multi-class dynamic traffic assignment model. In addition, a terminal simulation model is incorporated in this framework so that the impact of truck dispatching and traffic congestion on terminal operations can be estimated. Overall, the proposed solution framework introduces a new approach for modeling freight operations in hub cities, with which different operating strategies and scenarios can be evaluated. |
