The paper discusses a containers’ drayage by trucks, which is motivated by a real-life application arising in the intermodal freight transportation. This problem considers not only classical assumptions of the intermodal transportation, but also introduces the availability of containers as a new concept. For this purpose, we first describe the industrial context and provide the mathematical optimization model which combines a set of known and new constraints. We then propose a solution approach based on variable neighborhood search algorithm combined with pairing and insertion heuristics, as well as with variable neighborhood descent and tabu search methods. Optimization has then been embedded into a simulation model which designs the rail/road terminal. To be more specific, this optimization model can be used to evaluate several distribution policies, which results in a set of routing decisions and can adopt the best policy in a distribution network with competing rail and road transport services. Finally, we test the proposed model on real and generated instances characterizing several scenarios to highlight the performance and efficiency of our approach.

本文讨论了卡车对集装箱的拖运，这是由多式联运中出现的实际应用推动的。这个问题不仅考虑了联运的经典假设，而且还将集装箱的可用性作为一个新概念引入。为此，我们首先描述工业环境，并提供结合了一组已知约束和新约束的数学优化模型。然后，我们提出了一种基于可变邻域搜索算法，配对和插入启发式算法以及可变邻域血统和禁忌搜索方法的解决方案。然后将优化嵌入到设计铁路/公路枢纽的仿真模型中。更加具体，该优化模型可用于评估多个分配策略，从而得出一组路由决策，并可以在具有竞争性铁路和公路运输服务的分配网络中采用最佳策略。最后，我们在真实和生成的实例上测试提出的模型，该实例描述了几种场景，以突出我们方法的性能和效率。