Abstract
This paper studies a routing and scheduling problem of container trucks, where a shared resource environment is considered to reduce inherent operational inefficiencies associated with drayage container movements. To enable a trucking company to operate its fleet under a such environment, two operational strategies â?? street turning and decoupling operations â?? together with temporal precedence constraints â?? in addition to the time constraints that are typically included in the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) â?? were adopted. In addition, empty containers can be shared across the carriers participating in the coalition. Thus, the problem is formulated as a variant of VRP with profit from a carrier perspective. Without loss of generality, it is assumed that only empty container pickup tasks that are non-revenue are able to be exchanged between the private carrier and outside carriers, through a web-based information exchange system. For this collaborative problem, a pre-selection algorithm that provides the best potential candidate set of tasks into the routing and scheduling problem and general variable neighborhood search (GVNS) algorithm are proposed and evaluated. A series of numerical experiments show that the proposed truck operational approach can reduce the total operation cost, even though the total cost includes the task exchange cost.