A decision-tree stacking heuristic minimising the expected number of reshuffles at a container terminal

作者：Gharehgozli Amir Hossein; Yu Yugang^*; de Koster Rene; Udding Jan Tijmen

来源：International Journal of Production Research, 2014, 52(9): 2592-2611.

DOI：10.1080/00207543.2013.861618

• container terminal
• shared-stacking policy
• decision tree
• heuristic algorithm
• container reshuffling

Reshuffling containers, one of the daily operations at a container terminal, is time consuming and increases a ship%26apos;s berthing time. We propose a decision-tree heuristic to minimise the expected number of reshuffles when arriving containers should be stacked in a block of containers with an arbitrary number of piles. The heuristic algorithm uses the optimal solutions of a stochastic dynamic programming model. Since the total number of states of the dynamic programming model increases exponentially, the model can only solve small-scale problems in a reasonable time. To solve large-scale problems, the heuristic uses the results of the exact model for small-scale problems to generate generalised decision trees. These trees can be used to solve problems with a realistic number of piles. The numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the algorithm. For small-scale problems, the trees can quickly make optimal decisions. For large-scale problems, the decision-tree heuristic significantly outperforms stacking policies commonly used in practice. Using the decision trees, we can compare the performance of a shared-stacking policy, which allows containers of multiple ships to be stacked on top of each other, with a dedicated-stacking policy. Shared-stacking appears to outperform dedicated-stacking.

• 出版日期2014-5-3