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.
