Parallel computing method for intermodal shipping network design

This study aims to improve the efficiency of design technique for intermodal shipping network design, by virtue of parallel computing system. The existing methods for maritime liner shipping network design are mainly dealing with port-to-port demand. However, a big portion of the customers of a liner shipping company locate in the inland part. Thus, a holistic analysis is necessary to deal with the inland OD pairs, where the transport mode-change from inland transportation to maritime shipping is involved. This paper first reviews a solution method for the conversion of inland OD demand to port-to-port demand. Due to the size of the global shipping network, the computational burden of solving this method is quite intensive. Hence, this paper proposes a framework for parallel computing approaches to accelerate the computation speed.