Abstract: Under China’s railway-based coal transport system, railway-sea intermodal transport and land-sea complementary transport modes have gradually been developed. However, problems such as imperfect articulation mechanisms and poor information continue to affect the port’s operational efficiency. Through an in-depth analysis of the coordinated operation of trains and ships under the scenario of rail-sea intermodal transport, this study integrates key port operations such as unloading-coal distribution-loading with the goal of minimizing the cost of ship delays, establishing a mixed-integer planning model to study the co-optimization problem of train scheduling and ship coal distribution schemes in coal ports, and designing a heuristic method based on a variable neighborhood search to solve the model. Finally, this study uses a coal port in northern China as an example, conducting computational experiments using data of different sizes to verify the model’s effectiveness and provide management insights for future coal port operations.

Key words: coal supply chain, rail-sea intermodal transport, port logistics, variable neighborhood search algorithm