Rehandling problem of pickup containers under truck appointment system

Abstract

This paper studies rehandling strategies for pickup containers in marine container terminals where a truck appointment system (TAS) is in place. The main purpose of the TAS is to address the imbalance of peaks and troughs of truck arrival times, thereby reducing the number of external trucks during peak hours and improving their turnaround time. This study suggests that the TAS can also be used to improve the efficiency of yard handlings for pickup containers, thus improving the productivity of yard handling equipment. To this end, a stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) model was proposed considering the truck appointment information. A branch-and-bound (B&B) approach was shown to be able to provide the exact solution to calculate the expected number of rehandlings in the decision tree. To overcome the computational restriction of the exact solution, a heuristic was proposed and its performance was compared with that of the B&B approach.