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Introduction
This article deals with infrastructures, services, regulations and flows forming the sea-land container transport logistics system of the Campania region in Southern Italy. It presents an optimization model, called the 'interport model', for the economic analysis and strategic planning of port-hinterland container logistics systems. The model has been formulated and employed to investigate the inland distribution of maritime containers imported to, and exported from, Italy through the Campanian seaports of Naples and Salerno. The model is multimodal, allowing for both road and rail transportation, and multicommodity, covering both full and empty containers. The loading units can transit through the customs authorized off-dock freight villages called 'interports' and located at Nola and Marcianise in the same region, as well as through extra-regional locations which have a railway terminal, before reaching their final destinations (import flows) or the seaports (export flows).
The programming problem minimizes the sum of all container-related generalized logistic costs throughout the entire multimodal port-hinterland network. For road and rail container traffic, it solves the demand among different locations (seaports, interports, other inland nodes) and, more generally, it estimates the modal split of the inland traffic of containers transiting through the regional seaport cluster.
The main purpose of the network model is to highlight and measure possible advantages arising both from shifting the seaport exit (entry) of import (export) containerized cargoes to (from) the interports, and from employing intermodal solutions for port-hinterland distribution. As presented here, the model is an extension of the 'import' or 'inward' interport model developed by Iannone and Thore (2010), as it also optimizes the export container logistics (that is, the 'import-export simultaneous interport problem'). Such an extension enables a detailed empirical evaluation of the potential in terms of capacity utilization of the regional interport terminals, as well as of the railway container connections to and from the Campania region. At the same time, such topics attract wider interest, especially in the case of the public funding of infrastructures and services that feature opportunity costs and are supposed to have a positive economic impact on the territory. Better capacity utilization determines various benefits, such as the reduction of logistic costs, the mitigation of the environmental impact of transportation and increased local value-added and employment.
In recent years, the logistics...