Reshuffle minimisation to improve storage yard operations efficiency

Abstract

There are many ways to measure the efficiency of the storage area management in container terminals. These include minimising the need for container reshuffle especially at the yard level. In this paper, we consider the container reshuffle problem for stacking and retrieving containers. The problem was represented as a binary integer programming model and solved exactly. However, the exact method was not able to return results for large instances. We therefore considered a heuristic approach. A number of heuristics were implemented and compared on static and dynamic reshuffle problems including four new heuristics introduced here. Since heuristics are known to be instance dependent, we proposed a compatibility test to evaluate how well they work when combined to solve a reshuffle problem. Computational results of our methods on realistic instances are reported to be competitive and satisfactory.