Operational Friction in Multimodal Logistics Networks and Supply Chain Resilience: Implications for Onshoring and Offshoring Decisions

Disruption-driven transit-time uncertainty and volatile logistics costs are intensifying interest in shoring decisions and the resilience of multimodal logistics networks. This study introduces an Operational Friction Index (OFI) to quantify execution frictions on transport service-arcs (e.g., congestion, transfer complexity, and documentation delays) and examines how these frictions shape robust routing and shoring outcomes. We formulate a robust single-commodity multimodal freight routing problem under budgeted transit-time uncertainty and incorporate OFI into the objective via a penalty term, yielding a single augmented evaluation criterion. To solve large-scale instances, we develop an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm with OFI-aware scoring in selected destroy/repair operators and a record-to-record acceptance rule based on the augmented objective. Computational experiments benchmark ALNS against CPLEX and a Max–Min Ant System baseline across instance sizes, reporting optimality gaps and runtimes. The results show that ALNS achieves near-optimal solutions on tractable instances and scales effectively when exact optimization becomes time-consuming, while OFI helps explain performance differences across operational settings and industry profiles. The proposed framework supports the evaluation of shoring configurations and multimodal network designs under transit-time uncertainty