Emission Oriented vs. Time Oriented Routing in the European Intermodal Rail/Road Freight Transportation Network

Abstract

This study compares emissions and transit times from an environmentally oriented and a time oriented routing of large freight shipments in the European rail/road transportation network. We use the terminal-and-service selection problem (TSSP) to find the optimal routings under the different objectives. We show that substantial differences exist between the emission oriented routing and the time oriented routing. A large-scale simulation study reveals that shipments in the emission minimizing routing emit on average almost half as much emissions as if they were routed with the objective to minimize transit time. At the same time, the average transit time of shipments in the emission oriented routing almost triples compared to the transit time in the time optimal routing. This shows by experiment that substantial emission reductions can be achieved in the European freight transport sector by a corresponding routing of shipments but that this comes at the cost of a much lower service quality.