ABSTRACT
Determining optimal and near-optimal daily operational plans for trucks used for local delivery tasks has been an important application area of operations research for nearly 50 years. The mathematical optimization problems that result in this context are typically called vehicle routing problems and are generally difficult to solve since they include both combinatorial sequencing and discrete-item packing as subproblems. The majority of the developed quantitative models and solution approaches in this area consider general routing problems in which vehicles consolidate the loads of many customers on tours that begin and end at a common depot, and thus individual vehicle tours are usually constrained by the physical capacity of the vehicle to stow goods as well as time constraints given by customer requirements and operational rules. 172Intermodal drayage truck routing and scheduling problems represent a special class of vehicle routing problems called full-truckload pickup and delivery problems. Feasible routes in such problems are primarily constrained by time restrictions. In this chapter, we describe methods to improve container drayage truck routing and scheduling practice through the use of advanced systematic scheduling approaches based on information technology.
