Truck arrival management at maritime container terminals

In this work the management of truck arrivals in a maritime terminal is investigated as possible strategy to be used for obtaining a reduction in congestion and gate queues. In particular, a non-mandatory Truck Appointment System (TAS) is considered. Inspired by the work of Zehedner and Feillet 2013, we propose a multi-commodity network flow model for representing a maritime terminal. We solve a mixed integer linear programming model based on the network flow for determining the number of appointments to offer for each time window in such a way to serve trucks in the shortest time as possible, thus granting trucks a "good" service level. Some preliminary results are presented. Solutions show the effectiveness of the proposed model in flattening the arrivals distribution of vehicles.