Research On Container Drop And Pull Vehicle Scheduling Problem In Port Area

As an advanced form of mainstream organizations, drop and pull transport service is a low-cost, environment-friendly, highly-efficient transportation mode, which has been widely applied in most western developed countries, such as America and Europe. While in China, the development of drop and pull transport seriously lays behind. By applying the traditional logistics theory to the drop and pull industry becomes the focus of current research. In the field of academic research, domestic scholars focus on quantitative analysis, such as the policies and advantages to develop drop and pull transport. Less scholars focus on the specific applications, especially in port area. So it has important practical significance to do research on the drop and pull transport in the port container transport. This paper mainly did the following jobs:Firstly, this paper analyzed research papers in the field of drop and pull transport at home and abroad. Then a comprehensive analysis of the mode’s operation and operating procedures in port container transportation was did. And the vehicle scheduling theory, which is related to the port container transport, is studied. Secondly, container import and export freight tasks are broken down into the cargo subtasks. By this way, the multi-time windows problem in drop and pull transport is transformed into single time window problem successfully. Taking subtasks as research subjects, this paper establishes the vehicle scheduling model of drop and pull transport mode with time window. The recovery and delivery problem of empty containers is considered in the vehicle scheduling model. And the mathematical model is solved successfully by improved Tabu algorithm. Lastly, the advantages of drop and pull transport mode in the utilization of vehicle, transport efficiency are verified based on the small-sized examples and realistic-sized examples. The example analysis proves the economic advantage of drop and pull transport.