Purpose: The purpose of the article is to provide a tool to use the truck appointment system in order to increase the service quality of trucks, trains, barges and vessels at a multimodal container terminal. Summary: It is discussed about the container terminals that play the role of exchange hubs in intermodal transportation. These terminals offer transfer facilities to move containers from vessels to trucks, trains and barges and vice versa. In this regard, it is observed that truck appointment systems are a common approach to reduce truck turnaround times. The purpose of the article is to provide a tool to use the truck appointment system to increase not only the service quality of trucks but also of trains, barges and vessels. In this connection, a mixed integer linear programming model, which is based on a network flow representation of the terminal, is proposed to determine the number of appointments to offer with regard to the overall workload and the available handling capacity. In order to demonstrate the working of the proposed method, numerical experiments, conducted on actual data, are used quantify the benefits of this combined solution approach. Simulations are also used to validate the results obtained by the optimization model in a stochastic environment. (16 refs.)
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