Optimization for a multi-constraint truck appointment system considering morning and evening peak congestion

Abstract

Gate and yard congestion is a typical type of container port congestion, which prevents trucks from traveling freely and has become the bottleneck that constrains the port productivity. In addition, urban traffic increases the uncertainty of the truck arrival time and additional congestion costs. More and more container terminals are adopting a truck appointment system (TAS), which tries to manage the truck arrivals evenly all day long. Extending the existing research, this work considers morning and evening peak congestion and proposes a novel approach for multi-constraint TAS intended to serve both truck companies and container terminals. A Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) based multi-constraint TAS model is formulated, which explicitly considers the appointment change cost, queuing cost, and morning and evening peak congestion cost. The aim of the proposed multi-constraint TAS model is to minimize the overall operation cost. The Lingo commercial software is used to solve the exact solutions for small and medium scale problems, and a hybrid genetic algorithm and simulated annealing (HGA-SA) is proposed to obtain the solutions for large-scale problems. Experimental results indicate that the proposed TAS can not only better serve truck companies and container terminals but also more effectively reduce their overall operation cost compared with the traditional TASs.