A petri net modelling approach of intermodal terminals based on Metrocargo system

To cope with the growing demand of moving freight, an innovative system for easily and quickly manage containers moved by trains, named Metrocargoreg, has been designed. The leading idea of such a system is to speed up the operations of loading/unloading containers on/from trains, with the goal of assimilating goods to passengers in transportation, thus increasing the flexibility of the whole system and, possibly, optimising the space allocation inside each terminal. In this framework, whereas the performances of such a system appear to be promising, no models to evaluate them have been proposed yet. Then, to achieve this task, in the paper a model of Metrocargoreg intermodal terminals based on timed Petri nets is presented, which allows to easily define a modular, performance-evaluation oriented representation of the considered system