A Simulation Based Meta-heuristic Approach for the Inbound Container Housekeeping Problem in the Automated Container Terminals

ABSTRACT

We study an inbound container housekeeping problem in an automated container terminal. We propose an integer programming model to characterize the problem and provide a meta-heuristic algorithm to solve it. To tackle the random factors in the future retrieval process, a simulation module is embedded in the process of evaluating the objective value. By computational experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Moreover, we also conduct sensitivity analysis to examine the impacts of different algorithm parameters.

KEYWORDS:

• Automated container terminal
• inbound container
• housekeeping
• simulation-based optimization
• intelligent tabu search

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Project Number 71771154, 71971090, and 71821001, and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation under Project (No. 2020A1515011272).

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Project Number 71771154, 71971090, and 71821001, and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation under Project (No. 2020A1515011272).