Drayage Operations at Seaports

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.