The intermodal networks: a survey on intermodalism

A new and rather independent research field is now emerging on intermodalism, because intermodalism, that is the intermodal transportation, must study the behavior of systems different from single-mode transport systems. In fact, the importance of this new research field, its potential interdisciplinary of modeling the problem with the science of complex networks, are not yet completely appreciated by the scientific community. This is due to several reasons, among others the lack of a common background and a rather cumbersome approach of operation research to the modeling of transportation. In this paper we review the concept of intermodalism and the approach to intermodalism in the operation research field. Then we discuss the intermodal networks in the framework of real world networks to understand the behavior of intermodal systems as a whole.