# Multi-Attribute Collaborative Optimization for Multimodal Transportation Based on User Preferences
## 1 Background and Motivation  
With the rapid growth of global trade, multimodal transportation has gained widespread popularity worldwide owing to its advantages, including long industrial chains, high resource utilization, and excellent overall benefits. Particularly in China, as cross-border e-commerce thrives and international trade expands, the scale of the cross-border logistics market has kept growing, and the output of multimodal transportation in China has risen annually. Based on data from the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing and other organizations, the total revenue of China's logistics industry hit CNY 13.8 trillion in 2024, showing a consistent growth trend in the long run.  
Multimodal transportation can promote the deep integration of various transportation modes and is an inevitable choice for reducing costs and increasing efficiency in logistics. However, at the same time, the development of multimodal transportation faces many challenges, such as difficulty in achieving information symmetry, diverse transportation risks, and inconsistent regulations and standards. The root causes of these phenomenalie in the organizational form of multimodal transportation itself. Multimodal transportation involves a multitude of participants, including regulatory bodies, shippers, carriers, agents, and so on. Given that these stakeholders have distinct interests and thus differing preferences when formulating schemes, it follows that for the same transportation task, various parties may require different transportation solutions. Meanwhile, in the process of developing these schemes, extremism must be avoided; one cannot cater exclusively to the demands of a single party while completely disregarding the interests of the others. The key to promoting the sound and efficient development of multimodal transportation lies in achieving \"soft coordination\"--a means by which the interests of the decision-making entity can be addressed while simultaneously safeguarding the interests of all participants, thereby fostering an environment where these stakeholders exist in a state of both competition and cooperation [1].  
In light of this, this paper investigates decision-making methods in a multi-party participation environment based on the preferences of each participant. By utilizing fuzzy complementary judgment matrices to quantify the different preferences of each participant, and through simulating and analyzing the decision outcomes under various combinations of preferences, this paper reveals the impact of preference changes on the selection of decision-making schemes, providing managers with a more comprehensive decision-making perspective.  
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the related research status. Section 3 elaborates on the research problem, introduces the calculation of trans-shipment times under departure schedule constraints, and establishes a multi-objective mixed-integer programming model. Section 4 introduces the Genetic Algorithm (GA), the Appendytes Forsteri Optimization (AFO) hybrid algorithm (GA-AFO), and the fuzzy decision making method. Section 5 evaluates the algorithm through a case study and analyzes optimal decision making under different user preferences. Section 6 concludes the research and provides future prospects.