Wood Terminal - a innovative logistical concept for intermodal transshipment nodes

Design of new wood terminals and their operation in order to ensure a continuous material and information flow to the industry. This project aims at developing new operations strategies for rail terminals. A main aspect will be new business models and processes for asynchronous loading and unloading of wood at these terminals. In a first step existing transport and data flows needs to be gathered from the analyzed region. Further existing timber transport processes need to be defined and aggregated to a standard process view. The focus lies here on the intermodal aspect including railway transport. The supply process starts at the timber supply at the source terminal by truck and ends at the incoming material department. Therefore it will include the allocation, takeover, retrieval and billing process of rail wagons. The two main goals of this work is to create an overview of flows and costs in the timber supply network as well as showing the standard processes of the timber intermodal supply. Based on the results from the work described above reference processes for the intermodal wood supply are defined. The goal is to develop a concept for a secure asynchronous supply at the source terminal. In this concept trucks arriving at the terminal can load without delay their delivery directly on the wagon and leave to pick up the next delivery. In this working package we also aim to analyse the impact of such an asynchronous supply process on the railway system. A basis for this working package is delivered by Light-combi project of the Swedish green Cargo AB (Bärthel, 2003). The realisation of the new reference processes defined above acquires for a conceptual design and definition of new terminal elements (new rail wagons, transhipment devices or track and tracing). In this working package an infrastructure and cost evaluation is done to compare different possible implementation of the reference processes. This newly developed wood supply concept needs to be analysed and evaluated according to different flow and demand scenarios. An overall profitability analysis is conducted to assess possible business process improvements compared to the state of the art. To conclude this project several numerical experiments need to be conducted to show the performance and the marginal efficiency of the designed concept. For this purpose a terminal and a network simulation model will be developed based on existing models used by the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences for the evaluation of inland container terminals and networks (Gronalt, 2006). On the one hand the single terminal model will be mainly used to test the effects of different terminal designs and operation strategies on the overall performance of the terminal. The network model on the other hand will be used to evaluate the impact of different terminal location decision and transport flow request.