Economic route selection under the integrated operation mode: case study of China railway express in Zhengzhou

As a derivative and symbol of the 'belt and road initiative' (BRI), local governments in China raced to launch block trains to Europe, so called the 'China railway (CR) express', escalating the economic potential of Euroasia rail transportation. From a logistic integration perspective, this paper establishes a multi-objective optimisation model to find the optimal economical route by improving traditional route selection model, where the influence of the transportation mode and route is considered comprehensively. The genetic algorithm is applied to encode and solve the model. A case study is conducted to evaluate the economic benefit of various modes and route choices from China's cities to Lodz in Europe via Alataw. The findings show that the performance of an integrated operation in Zhengzhou is better than that of isolated operation. Compared with the isolated operations in various places, overall logistics time of integrated operation in Zhengzhou decreased by 7.14%, while the overall container logistics cost per unit decreased by 13.64%.