Decision-making problems of designing database in the aspect of planning transport of cargoes by intermodal transport

The article presents issues related to database design for problems of planning transport of cargoes by intermodal transport using road and air transport. The main aim of this paper is to develop the structure of the database used in the problems of planning transport of cargoes by intermodal transport. The issue of intermodal transport is a complex decision problem which requires taking into account many technical, economic and qualitative aspects of various modes of transport. The multitude of these aspects contributes to the processing of a large amount of input data used by advanced calculation algorithms developed to determine the optimal routes of cargo transportation. Designing database architecture depends on the number of modules responsible for the final determination of transport plans. It is assumed that the database is responsible not only for collecting input data about air, road infrastructure, processing of information necessary for transport but also for saving results generated by calculation modules. In the article, to understand the problem of the issue, a mathematical model of transporting loads by intermodal transport was included, and for its solution an ant algorithm was proposed. The developed structure of the database with the presented modules is a newly approach in problems of planning transport of cargoes by intermodal transport.