A Price-and-Branch algorithm for a drayage problem with heterogeneous trucks

This paper investigates a drayage problem, which is motivated by a carrier providing door-to-door freight transportation services by trucks and containers. The trucks carry one or two containers to ship container loads from a port to importers and from exporters to the same port. The problem is modeled by a set covering formulation with integer variables. We propose a Price-and-Branch algorithm for this problem, in which the pricing problem is a pair of shortest path problems, one for each truck type, in a suitable graph. The algorithm can determine near-optimal solutions in a short time.