Collaborative truck scheduling and appointments for trucking companies and container terminals

•Trucking companies and the terminal collaboratively determine truck arrival appointments.•Truck appointment and truck operation schedules are simultaneously determined.•The impacts of various deviations from the normal negotiation process are discussed.

Appointment systems for truck arrivals at container terminals have been applied in many ports to reduce truck congestion. This study suggests a new appointment process by which trucking companies and terminals collaboratively determine truck operation schedules and truck arrival appointments. This study formulates a mathematical model involving a sub-problem for each trucking company to determine the optimal dispatching schedules for trucks and the other sub-problem for the terminal to estimate the expected truck system time in each time interval. An iterative collaboration process is proposed based on a decomposed mathematical formulation. Numerical experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the decision process and the robustness of the process in practical operation conditions.