ABSTRACT
Along with all the benefits of containerization come increased operational complexities. The growth in the number of containers has already introduced congestion and threatened the accessibility to many terminals at port facilities. Traffic congestion at ports magnifies traffic congestion in the adjacent traffic networks, which in turn affects the trucking industries on three major service dimensions: travel time, reliability, and cost.
The increasing traffic congestion at and around the container terminals necessitates the investigation of efficient, reliable, and systematic ways of handling containers. In this chapter, the time window appointment system, which has recently been introduced as a way to reduce congestion, is investigated. Furthermore, the container movement by trucks in metropolitan areas with time constraints at origins and destinations is modeled as an asymmetric multi-traveling salesman problem with time windows (m-TSPTW) with social constraints. Different variations of the m-TSPTW are studied, and solution methods are reviewed and evaluated.
