Dispatching trucks for drayage operations

•Novel dispatching model accounts for constraints and randomness arising in drayage.•Developed expectations are applicable to other problems including transfers.•Preprocessing allows tackling problems with hundreds of multidimensional integrals.•Savings are achieved by increasing the limit on truck entries and storage capacity.

We propose a novel model for dispatching trucks given the constraints and sources of uncertainty that arise in drayage operations. The proposed model is designed to minimize the expected cost and is generally applicable to cases including different distributions of random parameters. Numerical examples illustrate this robustness of the model, as well as the potential for reducing the drayage cost by increasing the available storage capacity and permitted number of terminal truck entries. Mathematical results derived within this paper (e.g. expected dwell time) can be used more generally in analyzing transfers in transportation networks under stochastic conditions.