Multi-day Container Drayage Problem with Active and Passive Vehicles

We consider a real-world container drayage problem, where containers are transported between an intermodal terminal, a container terminal and customer locations. Given a fleet of trucks and trailers, the goal is to efficiently utilize these resources to complete a number of customer orders. Orders consist of several tasks with time windows, such as picking up a container at the terminal, delivering it to a customer, and bringing the processed container back. While generating daily plans is already a complex task, this paper introduces novel approaches for generating solutions for a whole week. Hereby we exploit the possibility to re-arrange parts of the order within the week that are not time-critical. The results show that this approach is highly efficient to decrease the operational costs and to service more customer orders with the same amount of resources.