A TWO-STAGE PLANNING APPROACH FOR IMPROVING MULTIMODAL TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS: CASE OF EEC IN THAILAND

Multimodal transportation network plays a vital role in the country’s economic development as it is a significant lifeline for containerized cargo flows from domestic to overseas and vice versa. A reliable transportation infrastructure, including railway, roadway, hinterland- and sea ports, enables better cargo handling and faster transportation, which are the major contributor to the seamless and cost-effective system. In Thailand, the eastern economic corridor (EEC) has been assigned to drive the country’s investment in uplifting innovation and advanced technology for the future generation. However, like many other freight corridors, EEC currently faces congestion, accident, and poor roadway service caused by the heavy usage of full container load trucks, limiting the capacity and leading to delays and unsatisfactory performance in the delivery. The main objective of this research is to develop a two-step planning framework for improving the multimodal transportation network performance. The first step uses bi-level programming to estimate the reserve capacity of the network in the upper level; the lower level is formulated as the joint-modal split and user equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment. From the results in the first step, we can identify the potential bottlenecks and inefficient operations at nodes in the multimodal transportation network: highway and rail networks connected from the hinterland container depot. In the second step, we measure the travel time reliability of the multimodal transportation network and use it to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of various infrastructure investment schemes. The results indicate the potential bottlenecks and could be suggested for the improvement plan.