Pricing and scheduling of barge hinterland transportation service for inbound containers

Barge hinterland transport is playing an increasingly important role in freight transport industry through reducing carbon emission, relieving traffic congestion, and providing high capacity and reliable transport service. This paper studies the barge service pricing and scheduling problem in a hinterland transport system under multiple planning horizons. The problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game with the hinterland container operator as the leader and consignees as followers. Counter intuitively, we find that it is optimal for the hinterland container operator to charge the barge service higher than the trucking service when the sea terminal’s free storage time is short. High barge service price could still attract consignees because long transportation time by barge benefits consignees by reducing their storage costs at the inland terminal. We also find that increasing carbon emission price could not reduce the emission quantity when the shipping quantity is high.