The container premarshalling problem under limited crane time: A constraint programming approach

Abstract

This study addresses the premarshalling problem when the crane time is limited and a complete rearrangement of the bay is not possible. This issue has been neglected in the literature, but it is very common in practice. We show that the use of standard approaches often fails to yield good solutions and develop a model for the problem in two steps. First, a constraint programming model is proposed for premarshalling with crane time minimization objective. Then, this model is adapted to the new problem. An extensive computational study shows that the first model improves on the performance of the existing state-of-the-art integer programming model and that the model of the new problem obtains high quality solutions even in short running times.