Scheduling for inland container truck and train transportation

Inland container transportation refers to the container movements among customer locations, container terminals, and depots in a local area. In this paper, an Inland container transportation problem by truck and train is investigated. Containers are classified into four types according to the direction (inbound containers and outbound containers) and container state (full containers or empty containers). Containers can be delivered not only by truck but also by train and the time windows of containers are considered. A mathematical model is developed by a graph model and a hybrid tabu search is proposed. The performance of the proposed method to find near optimal solutions is investigated by numerical examples generated randomly. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.