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The exponential growth of the flow of goods and passengers, fragility of certain products and the need for the optimization of transport costs impose on carriers to use more and more multimodal transport. In addition, the need for intermodal transport policy has been strongly driven by environmental concerns and to benefit from the combination of different modes of transport to cope with the increased economic competition. This research is mainly concerned with the Intermodal Terminal Location Problem introduced recently in scientific literature which consists to determine a set of potential sites to open and how to route requests to a set of customers through the network while minimizing the total cost of transportation. We begin by presenting a description of the problem. Then, we present a mathematical formulation of the problem and discuss the sense of its constraints. The objective function to minimize is the sum of road costs and railroad combined transportation costs. As the Intermodal Terminal Location Problemproblem is NP-hard, we propose an efficient real coded genetic algorithm for solving the problem. Our solutions are compared to CPLEX and also to the heuristics reported in the literature. Numerical results show that our approach outperforms the other approaches.

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In this research author reviews references related to the topic of multi criterion (goal programming, multiple objective linear and nonlinear programming, bi-criterion programming, Multi Attribute Decision Making, Compromise Programming, Surrogate Worth Trade-off Method) and various versions of vehicle routing problem (VRP), Multi depot VRP (MDVRP), VRP with time windows (VRPWTW), Stochastic VRP (SVRP), Capacitated VRP (CVRP), Fuzzy VRP (FVRP), Location VRP (LVRP), Backhauling VRP(BHVRP), Facility Location VRP (FLVRP), and Inventory control VRP (ICVRP). Although, VRP is a research area with rich research works and powerful researchers there found only 81 articles that relates various vehicle routing type problems with various multiple objectives techniques. This author found that there is no research done in some areas of VRP (i.e., FVRP, ICVRP, LRP and CVRP). It is interesting to see that this research area was completely an unattractive to master students (with zero research reported) and a somewhat attractive area to doctoral students (with 6 researches reported). Among the many multi criterion programming techniques available only three of them (goal programming, bi-criterion programming, linear and nonlinear multi objective programming) are being employed to solve the problem.