Joint dispatch of shipment equipment considering underground container logistics

Abstract

With an increase in the container volume, the problems of container terminal congestion and resource shortage may become increasingly critical. To enhance the service of a container terminal, this article investigates a novel loading and unloading scheme that optimizes the underground container logistic system and configuration and scheduling of underground logistics vehicles, gantry cranes at the handling shaft, and automatically guided vehicles on the ground. First, a mathematical model of the problem is established with the objective function of minimizing the maximum completion time. In addition, another objective function of minimizing the total waiting time of the underground logistics vehicles at the handling shafts is considered to form a multiobjective cooperative optimization model. Second, the genetic algorithm is adopted to solve the single model, and the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-III derived from the genetic algorithm is applied to efficiently solve the multiobjective problem, and the corresponding performance is experimentally verified. To verify the correctness of the models and effectiveness of the algorithms, numerical experiments of different scales with the solutions of two transportation modes are illustrated. The sensitivity analysis proves that the underground logistics vehicle grouping transportation mode can significantly increase the operation efficiency of the underground container logistic system and container terminal. The “superiority” performance at different scales indicates that instance No. 6, which includes 96 containers, 3 gantry cranes and 8 automatic guided vehicles, has the maximum effect and highest performance in the underground logistics vehicle grouping mode. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed method, which can select the configuration and scheduling scheme for an underground container logistic system, is rational and valid.