Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2005

Abstract

We consider a container terminal discharging and uploading containers to and from ships. The discharged containers are stored at prespecified storage locations in the terminal yard. Containers are moved between the ship area and the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the total time it takes to serve a ship, which is the total time it takes to discharge all containers from the ship and upload new containers onto the ship. We develop easily implementable heuristic algorithms and identify both the absolute and asymptotic worst-case performance ratios of these heuristics. In simple settings, most of these algorithms are optimal, while in more general settings, we show, through numerical experiments, that these algorithms obtain near-optimal results for the dispatching problem.

Keywords

Port terminal operations, Vehicle dispatching, Heuristics

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering | Transportation

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Publication

OR Spectrum

Volume

27

Issue

4

First Page

491

Last Page

506

ISSN

0171-6468

Identifier

10.1007/s00291-004-0194-2

Publisher

Springer

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Comments

Research was supported in part by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA).

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00291-004-0194-2

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