When road trains supply freight trains: scheduling the container loading process by gantry crane between multi-trailer trucks and freight trains

An efficient integration of rail transport into the hinterland traffic is an important topic for ports all around the world. In this context, we treat a scheduling problem where multi-trailer trucks (denoted as road trains) deliver containers to some gantry crane, which successively loads the boxes onto freight trains. A road train carries up to a dozen containers, so that a lot of energy is consumed especially when setting a road train in motion. Thus, there is a basic trade-off between the effort of road train and gantry crane. The more often a road train is relocated, the higher its own demand for energy, but the lower that for moving the crane when processing containers rather from nearby holding positions and vice versa. This paper formalizes the novel problem setting and suggests a heuristic decomposition approach, which determines the stop locations of the road train and schedules the gantry crane during the loading process.