Exact Algorithms for Practical Instances of the Railcar Loading Problem at Marine Container Terminals

With the growth in global trade and its environmental footprint, sustainable modes of freight movement are increasingly important today’s globalized world. This study focuses on on-dock rail, where rail terminal is located within marine container terminal. On-dock has recent years become an essential mode transportation to move containers out congested terminals. contributes literature by presenting tailored exact solution algorithms for a recently proposed optimization model optimize loading double-stack trains. In particular, 3-stage framework presented case when cars have single well. A complementary algorithm car multiple wells also provided. Our results show that computational times can be drastically reduced, from 2+ hours matter seconds, rendering suitable practical use.