Green Truck Appointment System at Container Terminals: Overview and Research Opportunities

The increase in international trade causes a sharp increase in the business of container terminals, with the growing of traffic congestion and environmental pollution in seaport surroundings. Among numerous research directions, truck appointment system (TAS) has gradually become a research hotspot due to its advantages in reasonable planning of truck arrival and optimization of scheduling. In addition, with the increasing awareness of environmental protection all over the world, the green seaport problem and its subproblem, the green truck appointment problem, gradually get the attention of academics. In this paper, the current status of research in green truck appointment problem is presented in the form of a comprehensive literature review which divides papers into three aspects: traditional TAS's contribution to green seaports, green TAS's methodologies of quantifying environmental costs, and coordinated optimization. By means of analyzing and comparing their strengths and weaknesses, valuable research directions in measurement of environmental cost are proposed, such as enriching pollutant types, more precise measurement of pollution emission, emission trading, etc. In addition, this paper also suggests that future research work should focus on data-driven green TAS modeling method and efficient algorithm design, so as to provide reference for the application transformation of research results.