Shared-Load Container Drayage with Battery Swapping

Abstract

Container drayage refers to short-haul truck movements of containers between ports and nearby customers and is often characterized by poor asset utilization and high costs. Motivated by evolving digital less-than-container-load (LCL) practices of major forwarders, we investigate a shared-load container drayage setting in which a single sealed container serves multiple customers on the same route in both delivery and pickup operations. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program with clustered service, delivery-pickup sequencing, multi-trip routing, customer time windows, and electric-vehicle constraints through battery-capacity and swapping limitations. Computational results show that shared-load drayage can generate substantial cost savings relative to traditional one-load operations, mainly through reductions in fleet usage, and that these benefits are strongest under higher sharing levels and remain robust under EV-related restrictions.