Integrated planning of loaded and empty container movements

Integrated planning of loaded and empty container movements

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Article ID: iaor20132073
Volume: 35
Issue: 2
Start Page Number: 457
End Page Number: 478
Publication Date: Mar 2013
Journal: OR Spectrum
Authors: , ,
Keywords: vehicle routing & scheduling, combinatorial optimization, optimization: simulated annealing
Abstract:

Efficiently planning drayage operations is an important task for transportation companies since these operations constitute a large part of the cost of an intermodal transport. In this paper, a full truckload vehicle routing problem for transporting loaded and empty containers in drayage operations is studied. For empty container transports, either the origin or the destination is not predefined. The problem is formulated as an asymmetric multiple vehicle Travelling Salesman Problem with Time Windows (am‐TSPTW). Two solution approaches are proposed: a sequential and an integrated approach. For both approaches, a single‐ and a two‐phase deterministic annealing algorithm are presented. Results show that the proposed algorithms are able to find good quality solutions in a small amount of computation time. The integrated approach clearly outperforms the sequential one and the results confirm the advantage of using a two‐phase algorithm for vehicle routing problems with hierarchical objectives. Finally, it is shown that the proposed integrated solution method improves previous results on a similar problem.

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