Planning and Scheduling in Intermodal Transport

We consider a problem that arises in intermodal transport and which addresses the scheduling of transportation requests that involve container movements from customers (shippers or receivers) to terminals and vice versa. The transportation requests are handled by a trucking company which operates several depots and a fleet of homogeneous trucks that must be routed and scheduled to minimize the total truck operating time under hard time window constraints. Empty containers are considered as transportation resources. They are provided to the customers and are repositioned after usage. For the problem at hand, we present a model formulation based on a full-truckload pickup-and-delivery problem with time windows and propose a two-stage heuristic solution approach.