A New Simulated Annealing Based Method for the Container Relocation Problem

Abstract

In container terminal yards, the Container Relocation Problem (CRP) aims to minimize the needed relocations of blocking containers above the container that would be retrieved. In this paper a simulated annealing based approach for the restricted version of the CRP is proposed. The proposed approach does not need any transformation of the problem input or output. The output solution is a vector of elements equal to the number of containers to be retrieved. The number of required relocations before retrieval of each container is generated. The idea of the algorithm evolves from accepting solutions with higher number of relocations at the beginning hopefully ending with minimum total number of movements. The computational experiments illustrate that the proposed algorithm is successful in generating optimal solutions for small size benchmark instances.