The construction industry is responsible for significant CO₂ and NOₓ emissions, with logistics activities contributing up to 25% of total emissions through more than 220,000 daily construction vehicle movements. While multimodal transport (combining road and waterway transport) offers substantial potential for emission reduction, the heavy nature of construction materials poses major challenges to widespread adoption. This research addresses the challenge of designing flexible multimodal transport networks for construction and demolition logistics that can accommodate the industry’s unique characteristics: highly variable demand patterns, frequent project delays, decentralized decision-making among multiple stakeholders, and complex trade-offs between cost, time, and emissions.
Current network design approaches fail to capture these construction-specific complexities, limiting the viability of modal shift initiatives. This research develops mathematical optimization models for multimodal network design that incorporate sustainability objectives alongside traditional cost metrics, enabling flexible adaptation to changing construction demands.
Key innovations include the integration of strategic hub location and electric-pusher routing for inland waterways, two-stage stochastic optimization for multimodal network design under uncertainty, and game-theoretic coordination mechanisms to align decentralized stakeholder decisions with public policy objectives.
