Global intermodal liner shipping network design

•A comprehensive methodology for the global intermodal liner shipping network design.•Inland transportation cost, port handling cost and shipping cost are all included.•A destination-based optimization model for seaborne shipping network design.•Develop two heuristic methods for solving the problem.

This paper presents a holistic analysis for the network design problem of the intermodal liner shipping system. Existing methods for liner shipping network design mainly deal with port-to-port demand. However, most of the demand has inland origins and/or destinations. Thus, it is necessary to cope with inland origin–destination (OD) pairs involving a change in transport mode from inland transportation to maritime shipping. A method is first proposed to convert inland OD demand to port-to-port demand. Then, a framework for global intermodal liner shipping network design is proposed. Finally, the proposed methodology is applied to and numerically verified by a large-scale network example.