A viral system to optimise the daily drayage problem

Abstract

The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organisation of the drayage movements. Drayage in intermodal container terminals involves the pick up or delivery of containers at customer locations, and the main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. This paper focuses on a new approach to tackle the daily drayage problem by the use of viral system (VS). VS is a novel bio-inspired approach that makes use of a virus-infection biological analogy that is producing very satisfactory results when dealing with complex problems with huge feasibility region.