Genetic Algorithm to Solve Container Storage Problem for a Single and Various Types

Abstract

The loading and unloading of container and their temporary storage in the container terminal are the most important and complex operation in seaport terminals. It is highly inter-related with the routing of yard crane and truck and their costs increased significantly especially without an efficient terminal management. This paper focuses on optimizing the way of allocating inbound and outbound containers in storage locations, known as the Container Storage Problem (CSP). It consists on finding the most suitable storage location for incoming containers that minimises rehandling operations of containers during their transfer to the ship, truck or train. We propose a genetic algorithm to solve the CSP for a single and various container types (refrigerated, open side, empty, dry, open top and tank). The main objective of this approach is to find an optimal container arrangement which minimize the re-handle operations of containers at their departure dates (unloading time). In fact, the wait time of customer trucks, the transfer time of yard crane and the Ship turnaround time are advantageously reduced. The performances of our proposed approaches are verified comparing to the results generated by the Last In First Out algorithm. Genetic approaches generated good results and experimental study confirms these and shows their effectiveness.