Container drayage problem integrated with truck appointment system and separation mode

Growing demand for seaborne trade has exacerbated the challenges faced by drayage operators in inland container transportation. In some cases, drayage operators must make truck scheduling decisions and book periods for trucks to visit terminals daily. This paper considers the appointment system and separation mode in container drayage problem, which consists of delivery and pickup transportation tasks for empty and full containers. A mixed-integer linear programming model is developed to minimize the total truck operating time while solving the truck scheduling problem, the empty container allocation problem, and the appointment problem. Another key feature of the model is considering the temporal constraints between tasks from a more realistic perspective. Due to the complexity of the problem, it is not practical to obtain exact solutions for large instances. Therefore, we complete the implementation of a new genetic algorithm (GA) that introduces a topological sort tailored to this problem. Several experiments and analyses are used to demonstrate the correctness of the proposed model as well as the efficiency of the algorithm. The findings indicate that, when compared to traditional mode, separation mode can reduce total truck operating time by an average of 29.4%. The total truck operating time difference between the two modes shows an overall positive trend if the task size increases. In addition, a rational setting of the appointment system will have a beneficial effect on truck scheduling. The decision on the selection of periods and the increment of each quota is crucial in optimizing the setting of the appointment system to reduce the total truck operating time for the mutual benefit of both terminals and drayage operators.