Truck Appointment System for Cooperation between the Transport Companies and the Terminal Operator at Container Terminals

Despite the number of sailings canceled in the past few months, as demand has increased, the utilization of ships has become very high, resulting in sudden peaks of activity at the import container terminals. Ship-to-ship operations and yard activity at the container terminals are at their peak and starting to affect land operations on truck arrivals and departures. In response, a Truck Appointment System (TAS) has been developed to mitigate truck congestion that occurs between the gate and the yard of the container terminal. The vehicle booking system is developed and operated in-house at large-scale container terminals, but efficiency is low due to frequent truck schedule changes by the transport companies (forwarders). In this paper, we propose a new form of TAS in which the transport companies and the terminal operator cooperate. Numerical experiments show that the efficiency of the cooperation model is better by comparing the case where the transport company (forwarder) and the terminal operator make their own decision and the case where they cooperate. The cooperation model shows higher efficiency as there are more competing transport companies (forwarders) and more segmented tasks a truck can reserve.

Automated summary

Despite high ship utilization and peak activity at import container terminals, truck congestion has led to the development of a Truck Appointment System (TAS). Numerical experiments show that a cooperative model between transport companies and terminal operators is more efficient than individual decision-making in reducing truck congestion.