Solving Vehicle Routing with Full Container Load and Time Windows

A service provided by the liner shipping companies is the transport of containers by truck between the terminal and customers. These transports consist of import orders and export orders. Even though these transports concern containers and, therefore, each order is a full load, an import and an export order can be combined in one trip where the container is emptied at an import customer and taken to an export customer to be filled.

Finding a set of optimal vehicle routes allowing these combinations is NP-hard. However, exploring the fact that the number of possible routes is small in the problem presented, we in this report show a model which can within seconds solve the problem to optimality. The model is tested on real-life data sets and additional constraints to the problem are considered.