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Optimizing the Landside Operation of a Container Terminal

Please always quote using this URN: urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-9004
  • This paper concerns the problem of operating a landside container exchange area that is serviced by multiple semi-automated rail mounted gantry cranes (RMGs) that are moving on a single bi-directional traveling lane. Such a facility is being built by Patrick Corporation at the Port Botany terminal in Sydney. The gantry cranes are a scarce resource and handle the bulk of container movements. Thus, they require a sophisticated analysis to achieve near optimal utilization. We present a three stage algorithm to manage the container exchange facility, including the scheduling of cranes, the control of associated short-term container stacking, and the allocation of delivery locations for trucks and other container transporters. The key components of our approach are a time scale decomposition, whereby an integer program controls decisions across a long time horizon to produce a balanced plan that is fed to a series of short time scale online subproblems, and a highly efficient space-time divisioning of short term storage areas. A computational evaluation shows that our heuristic can find effective solutions for the planning problem; on real-world data it yields a solution at most~8\% above a lower bound on optimal RMG utilization.

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Metadaten
Author:Gary Froyland, Thorsten KochORCiD, Nicole Megow, Emily Duane, Howard Wren
Document Type:ZIB-Report
Tag:Container Terminal; Integer Programming; Intermediate Storage Area; Landside operation; Storage space allocation; Yard crane scheduling
MSC-Classification:90-XX OPERATIONS RESEARCH, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING / 90Bxx Operations research and management science / 90B06 Transportation, logistics
90-XX OPERATIONS RESEARCH, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING / 90Cxx Mathematical programming [See also 49Mxx, 65Kxx] / 90C06 Large-scale problems
90-XX OPERATIONS RESEARCH, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING / 90Cxx Mathematical programming [See also 49Mxx, 65Kxx] / 90C10 Integer programming
90-XX OPERATIONS RESEARCH, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING / 90Cxx Mathematical programming [See also 49Mxx, 65Kxx] / 90C90 Applications of mathematical programming
Date of first Publication:2006/02/23
Series (Serial Number):ZIB-Report (06-06)
ZIB-Reportnumber:06-06
Published in:Appeared in: OR Spectrum 30 (2008) 53-75 doi: 10.1007/s00291-007-0082-7
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