A heuristic approach for transportation planning optimization in container yard

Abstract

This paper addressed the problem of blocks relocation in the export container yard. Previous studies of this problem have been limited in consideration of the relocation number only. However, crane operation consists of both trolley and spreader moves within the same bay. The number of relocation is not enough to be the best overall measurement for reducing the unproductive time. In the spirit of previous authors, an additional factor of crane cost is taken into consideration for containers relocation problem (CRP) in this paper. Three heuristic rules including minimum basic relocation number, minimum crane costs and minimum relocation operation times are proposed for determining the storage location of relocated blocks. A filtered-beam-search heuristic algorithm is proposed and presented for CRP with crane costs. Computational results on small and large-size problem instances allow drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the proposed method.