Container Forwarder Operational Planning: A Local Vehicle Routing Model with Simultaneous Pick up and Delivery Service

Distribution and transportation of containers is an intense problem faced by container terminals and forwarders to enhance container service level, where clients generally may require simultaneous pick-up and delivery service. In the paper an optimizing model of local container vehicle routing with time window constraints is proposed. By improving solution encoding, genetic algorithm (GA) operators and involution strategy, a genetic algorithm is developed to gain a efficient and feasible solution. Based on the Solomon's customer problem, experiments show that the proposed model and algorithm are potentially efficient and useful in solving container forwarder vehicle routing problems with simultaneous pick-up and delivery service.