The Storage Space Allocation Problem at a Container Terminal

ABSTRACT

Due to the asymmetry between the time required to retrieve a container to vessel and the time required to register a container at the gate, the storage space allocation problem solves the best allocation policy of these containers that minimizes the potential number of gantry movements during the assigning process and the future retrieval process. A decision rule-based heuristic is proposed, and three properties are discovered in this research. Comprehensive numerical experiments show that the proposed heuristic can solve the real-sized instances within a second, making it possible to account for uncertainty because the re-optimization effort is negligible. Moreover, when applying the proposed heuristic to a container yard at the Port of Kaohsiung in Taiwan and considering the extreme cases, the heuristic performs even better when the number of containers increases and still requires less than 1 s to solve these extreme cases. Finally, the proposed heuristic can be applied to different layouts of storage space and various material handling machines.

KEYWORDS:

• Storage space allocation problem
• heuristic
• container yard planning

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC for providing partial funding support under contract numbers MOST 103-2410-H-006-079-MY3 and MOST 105-2628-H-006-003-MY3. The contents of the article remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan: [Grant Numbers MOST 103-2410-H-006-079-MY3 and MOST 105-2628-H-006-003-MY3].