Pre- and end-haulage of intermodal container terminals modelled as a Full Truckload Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

Road transport makes up a large share of total costs of intermodal transport. In this paper pre- and end-haulage in the service area of intermodal container terminals is modelled as a Full Truckload Pickup and Delivery Problem. A single container is delivered from the terminal to a customer or picked up at a customer location and returned to the terminal. Customers impose hard time windows. A two-phase insertion heuristic is developed. In a first phase delivery customers are paired with pickup customers. These pairs of customers are assigned to routes in a second phase. The initial solution is improved by a local search procedure based on a CROSS operator. The construction heuristic and improvement heuristic are demonstrated by means of a numerical example.