Dispatching Vehicles in a Mega Container Terminal

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2007

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 newcontainers 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

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Container Terminals and Cargo Systems

First Page

179-194

ISSN

9783540495499

Identifier

10.1007/978-3-540-49550-5_9

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Additional URL

http://worldcat.org/isbn/9783540495499

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS