Dry Port Location Problem in Multimodal Transportation Networks and Data Envelopment Analysis: An Integrated Approach

Transferring of containers from road to rail network leads to some advantages such
as: reducing fuel consumption, air pollution and road accidents. Construction of Dry Ports has a significant role in the development of multimodal transportation and use rail and road system advantages. In this paper a new Hub Location problem (HLP) in combination with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is presented from standpoint of rail system on a rail-road multimodal network. The indices that are considered in DEA, are provided from HLP outputs including rail routes ' volume, rail container kilometer and rail routes ' length. The proposed model was implemented on Iran container network and 40 different scenarios based on the number of dry ports (2 to 5) and percent discounts on rail routes (0% to 90%) were evaluated. The results showed constructing two dry ports with considering 0%, 10% and 30% discount on rail routes are as efficient scenarios. Comparison of proposed location's facilities demonstrated constructing two dry ports in Tehran and Sirjan and applying 10% percent discounts on rail routes is the optimal scenario. In this scenario the rail routes ' volume, rail container kilometer and rail routes ' length were equal to 780 thousands TEU, 716 million TEU-KM and 3731 KM respectively.