Container drayage problem with flexible orders and its near real-time solution strategies

•Attributes requiring and releasing formulate various container drayage order types.•Four strategies including a window partition based (WPB) strategy are presented.•The WPB method could solve the drayage problem effectively and efficiently.•The WPB method is relatively robust considering the operating time biases.•This methodology can save operating cost in container logistics substantially.

This article studies a container drayage problem with flexible orders defined by using requiring and releasing attributes as a unified formulation of various order types. A determined-activities-on-vertex (DAOV) graph introduces a temporary vertex set to formulate different truck statuses. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model based on the DAOV graph. Four strategies including a window partition based (WPB) strategy are presented and evaluated extensively to solve the problem. Results indicate that the WPB method could solve the problem effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, this method is robust considering the operating time biases compared to other algorithms.