Intermodal freight transportation facilitates today's global trade. The benefits of intermodal freight transportation have been studied and are more observable in commercial logistics; however, the potential benefits of humanitarian logistics have not been thoroughly investigated. This research aims to present a resilient transportation framework by modeling intermodal transportation utilizing interoperable loading devices during disaster responses. We developed an integer programming model based on a time-space network by considering route and vehicle availabilities that are allowed to change with time. We consider vehicles with varying capacities in three transportation modes (i.e., ground, maritime, and air). The contribution of this study is threefold: (1) Two compatible unit load devices are proposed for humanitarian logistics; (2) a mathematical model that includes integer variable representation for vehicle fleets in different transportation modes is developed; and (3) intermodal transportation is compared with single-mode transportation using a real-life dataset. Our main results are as follows: In terms of cost, intermodal transportation is effective when demand occurs in consecutive periods and response time is short. Inventory is held more in intermodal transportation when it is cost-effective to use transportation modes with large capacities. Thus, the benefits of the responsiveness of intermodal transportation outweigh the costs of mode interchange and inventory holding for sudden-onset disasters where quick responses are needed within a short time.

中文翻译：

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使用单元装载设备的多式联运人道主义物流。

多式联运促进了当今的全球贸易。多式联运的好处已经被研究并且在商业物流中更加明显；然而，人道主义后勤的潜在好处尚未得到彻底调查。本研究旨在通过在灾害响应期间利用可互操作的装载设备对多式联运进行建模，从而提出一个有弹性的运输框架。我们通过考虑允许随时间变化的路线和车辆可用性，开发了一个基于时空网络的整数规划模型。我们考虑在三种运输方式（即地面、海上和空中）中具有不同容量的车辆。本研究的贡献有三：（1）为人道主义物流提出了两种兼容的单元装载装置；(2) 建立了包含不同交通方式的车队的整数变量表示的数学模型；(3) 使用真实数据集将多式联运与单式运输进行比较。我们的主要结果如下： 在成本方面，当需求连续出现且响应时间短时，多式联运是有效的。当使用大容量的运输方式具有成本效益时，多式联运中的库存会更多。因此，对于需要在短时间内快速响应的突发灾难，多式联运响应能力的好处超过了模式交换和库存持有的成本。