Autonomous truck scheduling for container transshipment between two seaport terminals considering platooning and speed optimization

Abstract

This study proposes an autonomous truck (AT) based scheduling problem for container transshipment between two seaport terminals, in which ATs can travel in platoons with short inter-vehicle distance. The following vehicles in a platoon can save fuel consumption because of the reduced air resistance. Based on a fuel consumption function with respect to travel speed and platoon formation, we formulate a mixed-integer second-order-cone programming (MISOCP) model to minimize the total operation cost. To address the extra computational challenges caused by the requirements of platoon coordination, we develop a column-generation-based heuristic method in which two types of columns representing AT schedules and platoon schemes are generated and added into the master problem. According to the practice of container transshipment between two port terminals in Singapore, we conduct extensive numerical experiments and evaluate the performance of the proposed method up to the instance of 50 requests in a two-hour time limit. The results show that the proposed CG heuristic can outperform the state-of-the-art solver by around 10% for the instances with 40–50 requests.