Solving a Real-World Problem of Truck-Trailer Scheduling in Container Transportation by Local Search

Abstract

Container transportation plays a very important role in global supply chains where companies of different countries exchange goods overseas. Operational costs of transporting containers are extremely high. Hence, optimizing itinerary schedules brings substantial benefits to logistics companies. In this paper, we investigate a realistic container transportation schedule problem in which trucks, trailers, and containers are separate objects located at different terminals, and trucks are planned to take trailers and carry containers between container depots, ports, and customer warehouses. In this context, containers can be 40ft or 20ft, and a trailer can carry one 40ft container or one 20ft container, or two 20ft containers. Moreover, a truck can detach the trailer and leave both the container and trailer at the warehouse if there is no forklift available. We first propose a mixed-integer linear programming model for describing the problem. Then, we propose a local search algorithm for solving the problem. Experiments on generated data instances show the benefits of the proposed algorithm compared to the previously proposed algorithm in which the improvement rate of the solution quality is 19.62% on average. Furthermore, the application of the model leads to rapidity in generating the solution; this task that used to take days is decreased to just one hour.