Negotiating truck arrival times among trucking companies and a container terminal

•Negotiation framework among trucking companies and a terminal in appointment system.•Trucking company makes appointment autonomously considering its own constraints.•Only limited information is shared among trucking companies and the terminal.•Terminal operator has limited information on trucking companies.•Terminal operator provides estimated service time to trucking companies.

Congestion of trucks in port areas has created serious environmental and traffic problems in many countries. One of main reasons for congestion is the concentrated arrivals of road trucks at peak hours. A negotiation process for smoothing truck arrivals in peak hours among multiple trucking companies and a terminal is addressed. The negotiation process is to be used for the appointment system for road trucks in container terminals. This paper suggests a mathematical formulation for smoothing the peaks in arrivals considering the inconvenience of trucks from changing their arrival times and the waiting cost of trucks in peak hours. This study proposes a decentralized decision-making model to support the negotiation process between truck companies and the terminal operator. It gives an acceptable solution to every player involved as well as the near optimal solution to the entire system from the global point of view. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the approach in this study.