Advantages of Decoupling Containers and Vehicles at Customer Locations

Abstract

The option to leave containers at customer locations (decoupling) and pick them up later by any other vehicle is analyzed for hinterland transportation scenarios. Several test instances are considered in order to estimate the positive effect of decoupling containers and vehicles. The solutions of the proposed test instances are determined by a tabu search approach for hinterland container transportation which includes vehicle routing and scheduling and empty container repositioning simultaneously. The impact of the width of time windows on the frequency and profitability of decoupling containers is analyzed by considering data sets with tight and wide time windows. Additionally, solutions for the minimization of travel distances and the vehicles’ total operating time are compared and opposed to solutions for cost minimization. The computational results show that the option of decoupling containers and vehicles leads to improved solutions regardless of the underlying objective function.