This book considers daily operations management for a fleet of trucks providing
container pickup and delivery service to a port. Truck congestion at access
points to ports may lead to serious inefficiencies in drayage operations, and
the resultant cost impact to the intermodal supply chain can be significant.
Responding to growing access congestion and its resultant impacts, many
U.S. port terminals have implemented appointment systems, but little is
known about the impact of such systems on drayage productivity. This book
seeks to develop optimization approaches for maximizing the productivity of
drayage firms operating at congested seaports. This book develops a drayage
operations optimization approach based on a column generation integer programming
heuristic. This approach incorporates the problem-specific complexities
in the column generation model. The approach determines pickup
and delivery sequences with minimum transportation cost. Finally, we use the
framework to develop an understanding of the potential impact of congestion
delays and access appointment systems on drayage operations. Findings
demonstrate the value of planning with accurate delay information; and also
indicate that drayage productivity can be quite sensitive to small changes in
time-slot access capacities at the port. This book is addressed to Operations
Research practitioners in the Transportation/Logistics/Supply Chain industries.