Container Drayage Transportation Scheduling With Foldable and Standard Containers

Traditional container drayage scheduling with standard containers has been studied for years. In this article, we focus on a novel container drayage transportation problem involving foldable and standard containers simultaneously. Four types of container tasks are required to be scheduled among a terminal, a depot, and a number of customers in an export-dominant area. The optimizing objective is to minimize the total working time of trucks in operation, which reveals the total cost for trucking companies to some certain extents. An improved truck-state transition method is designed to analyze the state of trucks. A mathematical model based on this method is built to describe the problem. A large neighborhood search algorithm considering time window constraints and the state transition is used to solve the drayage problem. The mathematical model and the algorithm are evaluated and validated based on a large number of randomly generated instances. Experimental results show that the developed algorithm is effective in solving the problem. With the increase of the maximum number of empty foldable containers that a truck can carry at a time, the total working time of trucks in operation decreases.