Revision with unchanged content. 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 dray-age firms operating at congested seaports. This book develops a
drayage ope-rations 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.
