Container storage and transshipment marine terminals

This study addresses the storage arrangement of transshipment containers on a container yard, in order to carry out efficiently the ship handling operations at a terminal where mega-containerships call. An optimization model is specified to investigate the flow of containers from the mega-containership to feeder ships using intermediate storage at the yard. A heuristic based on the lagrangian relaxation is formulated. The quality of the heuristic approach is tested in a number of experiments. In the experiments, various situations are analyzed with respect to mega-containership arrival rates, some strategies for stack arrangements and terminal layouts.     

A heuristic algorithm for yard truck scheduling and storage allocation problems

The yard truck scheduling and the storage allocation are two important decision problems affecting the efficiency of container terminal operations. This paper proposes a novel approach that integrates these two problems into a whole. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of total delay of requests and the total travel time of yard trucks. Due to the intractability of the proposed problem, a hybrid insertion algorithm is designed for effective problem solutions. Computational experiments are conducted to examine the key factors of the problem and the performance of the proposed heuristic algorithm.     

The simultaneous berth and quay crane allocation problem

This paper addresses efficient berth and crane allocation scheduling at a multi-user container terminal. First, we introduce a formulation for the simultaneous berth and crane allocation problem. Next, by employing genetic algorithm we develop a heuristic to find an approximate solution for the problem. The fitness value of a chromosome is obtained by crane transfer scheduling across berths, which is determined by a maximum flow problem-based algorithm based on a berth allocation problem solution defined by the chromosome. The results of numerical experiments show that the proposed heuristic is applicable to solve this difficult but essential terminal operation problem.     

Optimization of loading sequence and rehandling strategy for multi-quay crane operations in container terminals

In this paper, we consider the optimization of loading sequence and rehandling strategy in the terminal operation. We present an optimization strategy to minimize the number of rehandles, and establish a mathematical model to integrate the loading sequence and the rehandling strategy under the parallel operation of multi-quay cranes. Furthermore, we give an improved genetic algorithm to solve the model. We show the efficiency of the optimization strategy and algorithm by comparing them with previous strategies and heuristics.