Knowledge of Real Time Position of Vehicles and Its Impact on the Improvement of Intermodal Drayage Operations

Abstract

The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organization of the drayage movements. Drayage in intermodal container terminals involves the pick up or delivery of containers at customer locations. There are some works on centralised drayage management, but most of them consider the problem only from a static and deterministic perspective. The main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. The work we present here considers the knowledge of the vehicles’ real-time position, which permanently enables the planner to reassign tasks in case the problem conditions change. This exact knowledge of position of the vehicles is possible thanks to a geographic positioning system by satellite (GPS, Galileo, Glonass). This additional data are used to dynamically improve the solution.