The Belgian government grants an annual budget of €300 million to the intermodal operators, which offer transport services within Belgium of minimum 51 km.
The model incorporates a parametric variational inequality (VI) that formulates the user equilibrium (UE) behavior of intermodal operators in route choice for any given network design decision of the network planner.
We consider a discrete intermodal network design problem for freight transportation, in which the network planner needs to determine whether or not to build up or expand a link to minimize the total operating cost of carriers and hub operators under a general route choice model of intermodal operators.
The model also uses a cost function that is capable of reflecting the transition from scale economies to scale diseconomies in distinct flow regimes for carriers or hub operators, and a disutility function integrating actual transportation charges and congestion impacts for intermodal operators.
The CREAM [5] study, co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme, contained a number of technological and operational research and development activities identified by the stakeholders, who comprised rail infrastructure operators, railway operators, intermodal operators and their customers.
Its plans included a considerable subsidy of railroad intermodal operation, including TOFC.
Two principal courses have been taken by railroads to improve the economics of their intermodal operations.
The CLISME project (Client Service System for SME Intermodal Operator Aug 1999 July 200101) was one of the first EU co-funded FP6 projects aiming to improve the competitiveness of intermodal SME operators by utilizing Internet-based information technology.
This paper introduces an improvement on these methodologies by using the principles of consumer behaviour theory and the analysis capabilities of game theory to develop a dedicated purpose-built modelling tool for the analysis of intermodal competition within the operator's revenue function.
An exception to the decline is interstate operations, with intermodal container traffic growing due to competition between private operators.
The upcoming of road haulage in the late 1920s led to a severe economic regulation of this sector, intending to protect the state-owned railway operator from the new intermodal competitors.
