A Tabu Search Heuristic for the Inland Container Transportation Problem

The Inland Container Transportation Problem describes the movement of full and empty containers among a number of terminals, depots and customers in a hinterland region. A trucking company with a homogeneous fleet of trucks has to serve customers which either receive goods by inbound containers or ship goods by outbound containers. While keeping given hard time constraints the total operating time of all trucks has to be minimized. A comprehensive mathematical formulation which considers vehicle routing and scheduling and empty container repositioning simultaneously is defined. The problem is solved by an efficient tabu search heuristic. Computational experiments carried out on instances taken from the literature indicate that the proposed algorithm performs well with respect to effectiveness and efficiency.