Choosing Transport Modes: Road, Rail, Sea, Air & Intermodal – Door-to-Door Cost, Transit Time, Inventory in Transit & CO₂ per Tonne-km

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn six fictional shipments into tonne-km, price each one with the rate card of its mode, apply the minimum charge where the shipment is too small, and compare the cost per tonne.
• Cost three ways of getting one 20 t shipment from the plant to the customer: direct road, intermodal rail and short-sea, each with its short road legs and transshipments, and find the cheapest chain door to door.
• Add up the days of every leg into a door-to-door transit time, add the fictional variability to get a worst case, and measure how often recent rail shipments kept their promised transit time.
• Put a price on the days goods spend on the road, rail or sea: the in-transit cost per shipment and per year, the total with the freight cost, and the average value of stock that is always on the move.
• Size the safety stock each transport mode needs from demand and lead-time variability, look up z for the service level, and turn the extra pumps into a holding cost that belongs to the mode decision.
• Multiply the tonne-km of every leg by a fictional emission factor, add the legs into CO₂ per shipment for each chain, divide by the pumps on board and measure how much the intermodal chain saves against direct road.
• Write both transport costs as a fixed part plus a cost per km, tabulate them from 200 to 1,400 km, solve for the distance where the lines cross and draw the two cost curves in a line chart.
• Score the four modes on cost, time, CO₂ and reliability, weight the scores into one number per mode, chart the result and estimate how much CO₂ a partial shift from road to rail would save.