A multi-criteria optimization approach to balance economic and environmental goals in transport planning in Lithuania

ENThe transportation of freight by road is considered one of the primary causes of the increasing environmental burden due to greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the efforts of the European Green Deal to promote alternative transport modes, such as inland waterway transport (IWT), road transport still dominates, accounting for over 73 % of total freight in 2019. To improve the environmental sustainability while enhancing operational efficiency of the logistics providers, this study proposes a holistic approach integrating road transportation with rail and IWT. To address this problem, a multi-objective, multi-commodity, multi-modal Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model is developed, and an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed for its solution. The capacity of the proposed method is proven on the real-life case of the logistics providers in Lithuania. Our findings show that for environmentally safer and economically beneficial transportation, it is necessary to integrate all transportation means and not solely rely on road transportation. The developed framework for improving the operational performance of Lithuanian cargo companies may also be adopted by other countries and offers pathways for future research into stakeholder collaboration and technological integration in sustainable logistics planning. Keywords: sustainability; inland waterway transport; multi-modal transportation; multi-objective optimization; optimization heuristics.