Study On The Location Assignment For Outbound Containers In Container Terminals

Container shipping is an important part of the international trade.The increasing ofthe container throughputpose a challenge to the terminal operator in providing efficientand effective service. Therefore, it is needed to optimize the workflow and schedulingof the container operations to enhance the competitiveness of container terminals.Container terminal operations include a variety of decision-makings. In this thesis,we restricted our attention to the location assignment within a yard bay for outboundcontainers and the container pre-marshalling problem.This thesisimproves a dynamic programming model to assign yard location toarriving containers by adjusting the probability of the remaining containers which havenot yet arrived at the terminal, so that the improved model is more consistent with thepractical setting. The numerical experiments show that the improved model provides abetter stacking strategy which cansignificantly reduce the number of theexpectedrelocation movements.In order to solve the large-scale problem, a two-stage heuristic algorithm isproposed. In the first stage, based on the neighborhood search, a heuristic is developedto generate the precedence of the stacking patternsfor each container weight group. Inthe second stage, a heuristic algorithm based on rolling strategy is proposed, so that abetter stacking location can be chosen to reduce the number of the expected relocationmovements. The performance of the two-stage heuristic algorithm is evaluated bycomparing itwith the method used in practice. The numerical experiments show thattheproposed algorithm can significantlyreduce the number of the expected relocationmovements.As to the pre-marshalling problem, a rule-based heuristic is proposed. Thenumerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm is competitive.