Truck Appointment System

Gates are natural bottlenecks between a container terminal and its hinterland. We consider here a truck assignment system to control the trucks arrivals and departures at the container terminal gate. From a carrier point of view, the routes for a fleet of vehicles have to be optimized in order to handle all requests in a daytime horizon. A request includes two operations: the pickup of one container followed by its delivery. Either the pickup or the delivery takes place in a terminal and one time slot has to be assigned to it. A gate capacity is set for each time slot and time windows are considered for each pickup and delivery operation. The objective is to minimize a combination of travel costs, waiting costs and time slot assignment cost. A mixed-integer mathematical program is proposed for this problem. Tests are run on realistic instances proposed by the SOGET company.