
3
capacitated fixed charge network design problems (Crainic et al. 2001) and minimum-cost MCNF
problems (Retvdri et al. 2004).
The two most prominent exact approaches to solve MCNF problems are branching and decom-
position methods. Branching problems build on the idea of branch-and-bound (B&B) (Lawler
& Wood 1966) and have been used to solve integer MCNF problems (see, e.g., Brunetta et al.
2000). Decomposition methods were developed by Dantzig & Wolfe (1960) and used, for example,
by Barnhart et al. (1994) to solve message routing problems, formulating them as minimum-cost
MCNF problems and solving them via column generation (CG). Barnhart et al. (2000) utilize the
branch-and-price (B&P) algorithm (Barnhart et al. 1998), a combination of CG and B&B, to solve
integer MCNF problems. Here, the authors applied bounds provided by solving linear programs,
using column-and-cut generation at nodes of the branch-and-bound tree in combination with cuts,
generated at each node in the B&B tree, to mitigate symmetry effects.
In general, MCNF models have recently been used to model transportation systems, e.g., au-
tonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems in congested road networks (Rossi et al. 2018)
and to study the interaction of AMoD with the public transportation system (Salazar et al. 2019)
on a mesoscopic level. We refer to Salimifard & Bigharaz (2022) for an extensive overview of
applications and solution methods for MCNF problems.
Dynamic flows add a time dimension to static network flow problems and allow flow values on
arcs to change over time. In dynamic network flow models for traffic optimization, the size of the
underlying graph can be a limiting factor for the model’s granularity or time horizon. To address the
problem of exponential growth in dynamic networks, Boland et al. (2017) introduced the concept of
partially time-expanded networks to service network design problems. In partially time-expanded
networks, not all timesteps are included in the network graph, which allows for iterative refinement
to obtain a reduced graph size. Besides a reduced size of the underlying graph, multiple methods
exist to speed up computation time in large network flow models. For an extensive overview of
dynamic network flow problems, we refer to Skutella (2009).
In summary, various optimization approaches exist to solve MCNF problems for different problem
settings. So far, using an MCNF model to optimize intermodal passenger transport has only been
done on a mesoscopic level (Salazar et al. 2019). Analysis of passenger transport in large trans-
portation networks on a microscopic level is often done via simulation (Ziemke et al. 2019), which
is not amenable for optimization. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there exists no optimiza-
tion framework that is capable of determining the system optimum of an intermodal transportation
system on a microscopic level.
1.2 Contribution
To close the research gap outlined above, we propose an algorithmic framework to determine the
system optimum of an intermodal transportation system. Specifically our contribution is four-fold:
First, we model an intermodal transportation system by combining two core principles of network
optimization, layered-graph structures and (partially) time-expanded networks, which allows us to