On the integration of container availability constraints into daily drayage operations arising in France: Modelling and optimization

The paper discusses a containers' drayage by trucks, which is motivated by a real-life application arising in the intermodal freight transportation. This problem considers not only classical assumptions of the intermodal transportation, but also introduces the availability of containers as a new concept. For this purpose, we first describe the industrial context and provide the mathematical optimization model which combines a set of known and new constraints. We then propose a solution approach based on variable neighborhood search algorithm combined with pairing and insertion heuristics, as well as with variable neighborhood descent and tabu search methods. Optimization has then been embedded into a simulation model which designs the rail/road terminal. To be more specific, this optimization model can be used to evaluate several distribution policies, which results in a set of routing decisions and can adopt the best policy in a distribution network with competing rail and road transport services. Finally, we test the proposed model on real and generated instances characterizing several scenarios to highlight the performance and efficiency of our approach.