A Novel Auction-Based Truck Appointment System for Marine Terminals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper proposes a new method to solve the constraints of truck scheduling by drawing on the principle of polycentric management. The advantage of this paper is that the proposed polycentric strategy is a single-round auction mechanism, which ensures the balance of capacity in the truck scheduling problem, while also advocating the participation of all stakeholders. Numerical experiments are carried out to measure the effectiveness of this method in optimizing user satisfaction and enhancing terminal conditions, considering that MTO and LMC do not cooperate or only partially cooperate.

There are still some issues that should be considered.

1. The introduction and related work need to be enhanced. These articles may helpful for improving this paper: a two-stage auction mechanism for 3PL supplier selection under risk aversion.

2. The assumptions used in the model in the paper may not provide a detailed representation of the complexity of reality, which can ignore other influencing factors.

3. The contribution is not clear enough, please add it at the end of Introduction.

4. The quality of Figure 3 needs to be improved.

5. what is the relation between figure 3 and table 3 and 4?

6. Add more keywords, such as Licensed Motor Carriers, and Marine Terminal Operators.

 Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Comments 1,3 : The related work (particularly regarding the auctions as a capacity balancing mechanism) has been revised also utilizing the proposed references in Lines (189-192).  Introduction has also been revised to better highlight the contribution as requested (already phrased in second to last paragraph of the introduction in Lines (105-112)).

Comment 2 : We are already addressing potential issues that the assumptions could have regarding real world implementation of the TAS in Lines (657-663). We further highlight it with an example regarding assumption 2. However, we still affirm that there is a benefit with the application of the TAS as a tactical planning tool, as the generated assumptions have been shaped by practitioner insights (Line 504).

Comments 4,5 : The quality of the figure was improved. Following suggestions from reviewer #3 as well, we isolated access scheduling for a portion of the examined day. We also modified the labels on the y axis to show the used trucks and also better illustrate the occurrence of double moves. The connection between tables 3,4 and the figure is better highlighted. Changes in lines (567-585)

Comment 6 : We added more keywords as suggested (Collaboration & Marine Terminal Operators)

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear respected authors,

The content of the manuscript should be improved. Please consider the following remarks:

1. The abstract section is too long, and its content needs to be revised. The first part of this section, from lines 7 to 15, contains some facts that need to be supported by references. Hence, it is recommended to shorten them and shift them to the Introduction section, supported by related recent references. The methodology of the study should be clarified in this section. The sequence of the content in this section needs serious modifications.
2. It is recommended to hesitate using “we” or “our” in a scientific article.
3. The keywords should be selected based on the importance and frequent repetition of the phrases. From this point of view, “scheduling” needs to be revised or eliminated, and some other keywords may be added to the list.
4. Abbreviations should be defined once in the body of the text, and later on, you should hesitate to use the complete phrases. From this point of view, the manuscript should be re-checked. For instance, TAS has been defined more than once in the manuscript. Please check the other ones used in the text.
5. The literature gap should be highlighted, and the contribution of the study should be matched with it. To do so, respected authors may consider merging the introduction and the literature review parts.
6. For the problem definition section, it is suggested to mention some related and similar studies in case the potential readers need to know more about the definitions, assumptions, mathematical models, etc.
7. These types of problems are basically Np-hard, because by increasing the number of depots and trucks, the mathematical model will be exponentially increased, and so the time to solve such problems using exact methods. Therefore, proposing a metaheuristic method would increase the quality of the study. It is possible that since small random problems have been generated, the provided exact method could solve the problems in a short time, according to what the respected authors have mentioned in line 565, but still, the reviewer does not think this method can solve bigger problems. Hence, it is suggested to propose a metaheuristic method, generate bigger problems, and then solve them using both methods and compare them. The results of such comparisons would increase the quality of the study significantly.

Author Response

Comment 1 : The abstract has been revised to have a structured format and shortened by 100 words, as per editorial requirements. The same issue was highlighted by the academic editor.

Comment 2 :  We heavily reduced the use of we, our and us in the manuscript. However, it may appear in some instances where it is believed to better convey the message to the reader.

Comment 3 : We rethought the keywords as also suggested by reviewer #1. Notwithstanding, we decided to keep the keyword scheduling as we believe it to be a cornerstone of our methodology.

Comment 4 : The definition of abbreviations is happening maximum twice. Once in the abstract and once in the body text. After that only abbreviations are used when defined. We realised we never correctly defined the abbreviation WDP-Winner Determination Problem, which is now fixed.

Comments 5,6 : We understand the reviewer’s concern, but we believe that we sufficiently include in the introduction references to academic articles (Lines 50 -73) justifying the research gap related to our contribution. Thus, having a separate section further expanding on the state of the art of the two major methods used in this article (Truck Appointment Systems and Auctions) is better for readability in our opinion. On a related note, some of the notation used in the problem definition is directly related to articles in the literature review such as double moves (Schulte, F.; Lalla-Ruiz, E.; González-Ramírez, R.G.; Voß, S. Reducing port-related empty truck emissions: A mathematical approach for truck appointments with collaboration. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review 2017, 105, 195–212.). We can use the same reference in the problem definition section if the reviewer believes it will enhance clarity.

Comment 7 : We comprehend the reviewer’s concerns and to that aspect we generated additional four larger instances. To better highlight the quality of the results and the lack of necessity for the heuristic we reran all experiments with a time 1 hour time limit. We also refined the description of the numerical results as shown in Lines (555-563). Our instances are designed to reflect operations of a medium sized terminal (Line 503), as was the port that we used for data acquisition. We also added in the future work the development of a heuristic as a suggestion for port terminals with larger truck throughput (Lines 672-674). We further validate the size of our instances with this reference, which shows that  the designed instances are of reasonable size: Shiri, S.; Huynh, N. Optimization of drayage operations with time-window constraints. International Journal of Production Economics 2016, 176, 7–20.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper presents an approach to improve the assignment of time windows to trucks visiting ports for the delivery or pickup of goods. The approach follows an auction mechanism, with detailed investigation of the relevant behavior of the truck and the port companies, and suitable optimization algorithms to run and evaluate the auction. The problem is highly relevant, especially in times of continuously growing international trade. Auction mechanisms for truck assignment are not new; the same is valid for optimization algorithms, e.g. for ports, parcel distribution centers, and similar facilities. However, the detailed mechanism described in the paper appears to be novel, and the results presented show the value of the presented work.

The topic is, for sure, related to logistics.

The paper is well-structured and its general message is clear. The text follows the structure, and also its detailed messages are sound. The model and the experimental base are well described, and the results are reasonably presented.

However, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed before publication.

(1) Editorial issues, like wording, typos, punctuation: see the enclosed PDF.

(2) Specific points:

++ “time window” without hyphen

++ Avoid “we” and use passive voice or – if necessary– “the authors”

++ Avoid “our”; in many cases just replace by “the” or “this”, otherwise restructure the sentence

++ Unify writing of “First-Come-First-Served” in the paper

(3) Figures

Fig. 2: Fonts are clearly too small. Perhaps, rotate the figure by 90° and use full page width to enlarge fonts.

Fig. 3: Figure is looking ugly; very big differences in font size. Recommend to reduce the complete figure by about 50% (might even fit without rotation), but think about eliminating the concrete job numbers (do they carry any information for the reader?), put “Windows” and “Jobs” aside once and only print the numbers in the columns (but with much larger fonts), eliminate the headline “Output schedule...” or transfer it to the figure caption. What does the duplication “(m)” say to the reader in the axis?

Fig. 4:  Fonts are too small. It might be sufficient to use the full page width. Perhaps, you can easily increase the fonts at the axes captions by ~25%?

(4) References

The reference list requires your attention. You will really need to carefully check, rectify, amend, and align it, ideally taking into account the journal’s standards. Some repetitive issues are:

++ Check the use of italics for books, web pages etc.

++ There is a wrong citation in refs 2, 3 etc.

++ Unify the capitalization of paper titles

++ For all journals, make sure that you specify the volume and the issue, if the journal is using such system

++ If an (online) journal does not provide page numbers, specify the article number

++ For any book contribution, make sure to specify the publisher and the city of publication. If applicable, also give the editors

++ If a conference has been published as a regular book (see above), cite it accordingly (i.e., city of the publisher, not the conference). If publisher etc. are unknown, specify the location of the conference as well as the exact dates. In both cases, specify the page numbers if the articles have been numbered (i.e., pages should not be given if every article starts with 1).

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

see above.

Author Response

Comments 1,2 – We tried to implement all editorial suggestions found on the pdf, but for sake of readability we did not highlight all of them in blue in the revised manuscript. In particular, with respect to the use of we and our, this was also a comment from reviewer #2 and we drastically reduced their use in the manuscript. However, it may appear in some instances where it is believed to better convey the message to the reader. Specific points that were made were all aligned with reviewer’s suggestions.

Comment 3 :

Figures 2,4 – We believe that for Figure 2 rotating the figure by 90 degrees will impede the readability and flow of the text, so we refrain from doing that. For Figure 4, we believe the fonts to be adequate and enlarging the fonts would not allow us to have the two heatmaps side by side, again impeding interpretability.

Figure 3 – We recognize the issues with the Figure and agree with the comment. We revised the figure per reviewer’s suggestions to only reflect a significant portion of the day. In particular, we modified the labels on the y axis to show the used trucks and also better illustrate the occurrence of double moves. The use of m in the x-axis has also been removed.  

Comment 4: Issues regarding referencing have been corrected as per reviewer’s suggestions.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Please check grammars and formulas.

Please check grammars and formulas.

Reviewer 2 Report

Deraly respected authors,

The manuscript's content has been modified according to what the reviewer recommended. According to the reviewer's point of view, the manuscript is worth publishing in the respected journal.

Regards,