Semi-autonomous platooning for the local container drayage problem with transshipment depots

Local container drayage, employing trucks for first/last-mile transportation services, is an important part of the entire container transportation chain. To make the best use of the emerging platooning technology, the drayage process is divided into two echelons by setting transshipment depots: trunk transportation from the terminal to transshipment depots and feeder transportation from transshipment depots to customers. We specifically consider the adoption of semi-autonomous platooning mode only in the trunk transportation, which is more in line with the application characteristics of the platooning technology. For the problem in this scenario, we establish a mixed integer programming model and propose the lower bound. To solve this problem, a tailored tabu search heuristic algorithm is designed. Computational experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, quantify the advantages of the new operation mode, and investigate the influences of a few parameters.