The use of intermodal routes may be advantageous in several situations such as to export agricultural products. However, the possibility of reducing logistics costs depends on the existence of intermodal facilities for the transshipment and the integration between the available modes. In this context, we propose a model for flow allocation and location of intermodal terminals to support investment decisions in network infrastructure and routing. The model is closely related to the NP-hard p-median problem. Multiple levels were used to represent the flows between two terminals, and a sparse structure was used for the network matrix representation. Tests using a soybean network for exports based on secondary data were performed to verify the model consistency and to illustrate the potential of analysis of the model, while randomly generated instances were used to evaluate its computational performance using two kinds of optimization software.
Facility location; Network flows; Intermodal transport; Logistics; Soybean exports
