A CONSTRUCTIVE HEURISTIC FOR THE CONTAINER RELOCATION PROBLEM

作者：Wu Kun Chih; Ting Ching Jung

来源：International Journal of Industrial Engineering-Theory Applications and Practice, 2016, 23(3): 195-206.

• container relocation problem
• block relocation
• unrestricted
• constructive heuristic
• container terminal

Container terminals face a challenge of handling the growing number of containers to adapt the expansion of globalized economy. Reducing container relocation is an important issue in operational aspect at port, because the relocation is a non-value-added movement but a time consuming and wasteful activity. In this study, a container relocation problem (CRP) is considered to obtain the minimum number of relocations to retrieve a set of containers stored at a bay. Specifically, the unrestricted-CRP is concerned in this paper, in which not limited to the containers above the target container can be relocated. We propose a novel constructive heuristic to quickly generate a good quality solution to the container relocation problem. Comprehensive numerical experiment of total 12,500 unrestricted instances from the literature is tested and compared. The computational results show that, comparing to the existing construction heuristic, our heuristic can reduce the number of relocations by 3.55% on average.

• 出版日期2016