Container Transportation Scheduling Between Port Yards and the Hinterland in Yunfeng

Abstract

This paper introduces a container transportation scheduling problem in a large logistic company (Yunfeng) in Shanghai City, PR China. This problem considers two types of container transportation orders (i.e., door-to-door orders and warehouse orders) between port yards and the hinterland. Unlike the pickup and delivery problem with time windows, this problem needs to consider not only container pickups and deliveries, but also the loading or unloading of cargo inside containers. Moreover, this problem takes account of some constraints on container transportation regulations in China. We formulate this problem as a mixed-integer programming model and design an improved backtracking search optimization algorithm. Based on the proposed model and algorithm, a vehicle scheduling decision support system is also developed to integrate data collection, preprocessing, Amap (a digital map, navigation, and location service provider in China) interfacing, and optimization. The improvement of the operational efficiency is validated by the usage of the proposed system in practice.