A local search heuristic for the pre- and end-haulage of intermodal container terminals

Pre- and end-haulage of intermodal container terminals involves the pickup or delivery of containers at customer locations. The attractiveness of intermodal transport can be increased by organizing the road segment in the intermodal transport chain more efficiently. In this paper the drayage of containers in the service area of an intermodal terminal is modelled as a full truckload pickup and delivery problem with time windows (FTPDPTW). A two-phase insertion heuristic is proposed to construct an initial solution. This solution is improved with a local search heuristic based on three neighbourhoods. Numerical experiments are described to demonstrate the mechanisms of the heuristics.