Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers (대한산업공학회지)

Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers (대한산업공학회)
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A* Algorithm for Optimal Intra-bay Container Pre-marshalling Plan

컨테이너 터미널에서 베이 내 컨테이너의 최적 재정돈을 위한 A* 알고리즘

  • Ha, Byung-Hyun (Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Pusan National University) ;
  • Kim, Sang-Su (Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Pusan National University)
  • 하병현 (부산대학교 산업공학과) ;
  • 김상수 (부산대학교 산업공학과)
  • Received : 2012.03.12
  • Accepted : 2012.05.19
  • Published : 2012.06.01
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Abstract

In most container terminals, containers are piled up and stored in a yard in order to utilize the space efficiently. Hence, it requires unproductive container-handling operations to retrieve a container that is not placed on the top of a container stack. As a result, to streamline container-loading operations by which containers are transferred from a yard to a vessel, it is necessary to pre-marshal (i.e., shuffle in advance) containers in accordance with container-loading plan. We propose $A^*$ algorithm to find the optimal container-relocation sequence for the intra-bay container pre-marshalling problem. To work out the heuristic estimate for the proposed $A^*$ algorithm, we introduce the container rearrangement problem and obtain the lower bound of the length of the optimal relocation sequence. The performance of the algorithm is validated extensively by the numerical experiments on the problem instances that are given in the previous studies and generated randomly with various parameters.

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