Drayage Routing Problems: A Comprehensive Survey and a New Compact Model

ABSTRACT Drayage involves short‐distance container trucking, a crucial part of intermodal transportation that fills the gap between long‐haul transportation modes and inland facilities. Because of its high costs, drayage has been increasingly drawing the attention of researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, who have been exploring opportunities to improve the performance of drayage operations. In particular, operations researchers have traditionally contributed to these efforts by mathematically formulating drayage problems and by developing exact or heuristic approaches to solve them. We note that, in such problems, the modelling of trucks and containers has generally been limited to considering homogeneous containers and single‐container trucks. However, recently introduced problems, such as the drayage routing problem with heterogeneous fleet, compatibility constraints and truck load configurations (DRP‐HCL), enable richer fleet modelling, by allowing the consideration of containers of any type and trucks with specific load configurations, as well as truck–container and container–container compatibility constraints. In this paper, we review the literature on drayage, discussing how fleet modelling has evolved over the years until the introduction of DRP‐HCL. Based on our review, we provide an outlook on the modelling of trucks and containers in upcoming drayage problems. This paper also presents a compact mixed‐integer programming (MIP) formulation for DRP‐HCL, which can outperform a previously proposed formulation and can be useful for researchers and practitioners who aim to solve small‐ or medium‐sized instances using black‐box MIP solvers.