Development of Performance Indicators and Methods for a Comparison of Various Transport Modes (Road, Rail, Sea)

Abstract

Transportation of cargo and passengers is part of the everyday life for almost every human being. This is a big industry which requires continuously large amount of resources. In order to get maximum benefit from the transport sector, there is need for an economically effective and environmentally friendly transport system. This is a complex task to solve which requires high level knowledge from various fields of education.

This Master Thesis is a part of analysis which takes into account the cost and environmental impact and time of container transportation. The latter is taken into consideration because the cargo unit is clearly fixed and is a very widespread way of transporting cargo. Large amount of transported cargo could mean significant impact on cost and environmental impact aspects and therefore it is believed that the potential to improve the overall transport chain is to be substantial. Basing on this, the objective of this Master Thesis is set to develop such comprehensive and universal methodology as well as providing theoretical background, which allows performing comparative analysis on various modes of transport in the frame of cost and environmental impact. Transport modes taken into consideration are road, rail and sea. Air transport is excluded because it is very much distinguished from other modes. Developed methodology is finally tested and analyzed with two separate transport scenarios.

To reach the objective, results and methods available from existing and up to date works are utilized. Available methods will be adapted according to the needs of the analysis.

The main interest about this methodology is the outcome of the analysis in order to find the fastest, cheapest or most environmentally friendly way of cargo transport. Moreover, the obtained method allows to determine the influencing factors, their importance of the impact and bottlenecks of various transport scenarios. Consequently, the outcome of the methodology could be a significant contributor on deciding about the improvement measures of the transport chain.