Model and algorithm of multi-depot container truck transportation with time windows

A multi-depot container truck transportation problem with time windows is studied in this paper. Two types of transportation resources as trucks and containers and four types of container movements as inbound/outbound full and inbound/outbound empty movements are considered. The problem is formulated as a graph and then mathematically modeled as a multi-traveling salesman problem with time windows (m-TSPTW) with multiple depots. A reactive tabu search (RTS) algorithm is developed and tested based on a number of randomly generated examples. The results compared with the commercial tool CPLEX indicate that the RTS algorithm can find the optimum solutions of small-sized examples in short time. Furthermore, the algorithm is robust and stable to solve large-sized example.