Analysis of Demand and Operations of Inter-modal Terminals

Inter-modal terminals (IMT) reduce road congestion and exploit economies of scale by pooling demand from surrounding areas and using rail to transport containers to and from ports. The alternative to using IMTs is using trucks to transport containers directly to and from the port. Trucks increase road congestion, but rail requires additional handling of containers (lift on and lift off). The attractiveness of truck versus rail is dependent on a number of variables such as costs, total travel time, frequency of services, risk and material resources. To date, the use of open data to analyse and model freight movements has been minimal, primarily because of the shortage of open data focusing on freight movements across cities, regions or countries. In this paper, we leverage open government data for the Port Botany rail network and use it to develop exible and dynamic simulation and optimisation tools that enable various stakeholders including IMT operators, port authorities and government policy makers to make more informed decisions not only about pricing, but also about operation scheduling and internal operations.