Presenter: Mr. Hassan Sarhadi (PhD Student)

Abstract: Rail-truck intermodal transportation has experienced remarkable growth over the past three decades, and plays a vital role in the freight transportation system in North America. Hence, a crucial issue is to guarantee continuity of service and to minimize the adverse impacts following disruption, natural or man-made. We make the first attempt to develop an analytical framework that could be used by rail intermodal owners to determine the best fortification plan in order to minimize the impact of an intentional attack. The complexity of the resulting tri-level mathematical model motivated the development of a decomposition-based heuristic solution technique that was used to solve and analyze problem instances generated using the realistic infrastructure of a railroad operator.