The role of expressway roadside rest areas in truck arrival behaviors at ports with truck appointment system

The Truck Appointment System (TAS) has emerged as an effective management strategy for mitigating congestion at container ports. However, existing studies have rarely examined TAS-induced behavioral adjustments among truck drivers, particularly changes in their use of expressway roadside rest areas. To address this research gap, this study investigates how different TAS time-window settings influence truck drivers’ use of en-route service facilities, including rest areas, restrooms, dining services, and refueling stations, during trips to a port. The empirical analysis results of Colombo Port truck arrival data show that TAS implementation can stabilize both rest-area utilization and port-gate arrival rates. A series of agent-based simulation experiments were conducted to investigate changes in container truck drivers’ time-use behavior at rest areas and their subsequent arrival behavior at port gates under various scenarios. Additionally, TAS effectively influences the utilization of roadside rest areas, highlighting the underdevelopment issues of truck service facilities in Sri Lanka. The simulated utilization of service facilities is highest for restrooms, followed by rest areas and refueling stations, whereas dining facilities are used less frequently. The results also indicate that a one-hour appointment window provides the most effective performance among the tested scenarios for the case-study port. When the TAS time window is shorter than two hours, its impacts on rest-area operations should be explicitly considered. These findings provide theoretical and practical insights into the coordination of port appointment policies and expressway rest-area infrastructure planning, and demonstrate how TAS can influence both en-route facility utilization patterns and external container truck arrival dynamics at port gates.