There is a worldwide trend to automate the handling operations in port container terminals in an effort to improve productivity and reduce labor cost. This study iscusses how to apply an AGV(automated guided vehicle) system to the handling of containers in the yard of a port container ter-minal. The main issue of this paper is how to assign tasks of container delivery to AGVs during ship operations in an automated port container terminal. A dual-cycle operation is assumed in which the loading and the discharging operation can be performed alternately. Mixed integer linear program-ming formulations are suggested for the dispatching problem. The completion time of all the dis-charging and loading operations by a quayside crane is minimized, and the minimization of the total travel time of AGVs is also considered as a secondary objective. A heuristic method using useful properties of the dispatching problem is suggested to reduce the computational time. The perfor-mance of the heuristic algorithm is evaluated in light of solution quality and computation time.

WebME is an Web-based integrated modeling environment that implements a multi-facetted modeling approach to mathematical model representation and management. Key features of WebME include the following: (i) sharing of modeling knowledge on the Web, (ii) a user-friendly interface for creating, maintaining, and solving models, (iii) independent management of mathematical models from conceptual models, (iv) object-oriented conceptual blackboard concept, (v) multi-facetted mathematical modeling modeling, and (vi) declarative representation of mathematical knowledge. This paper presents details of design and implementation issues that were encountered in the development of WebME.

Performance of the group cumulative sum (CUSUM) control scheme using multiple univariate CUSUM charts is more sensitive to the change of quality control (QC) characteristics than the control chart schemes based on the Hotelling statistic We vexamine three group charts for multivariate normal data sets simulated with various correlation structures and shift directions in the mean vector. These group schemes apply the original measurement vectors, the scaled residual vectors from the re-gression of each variable on all others and the principal component vectors respectively to calculat-ing the CUSUM statistics. They are also compared to the multivariate QC charts based on the Ho-telling statistic by estimating average run lengths, coefficients of variation of run length and ranks in signaling order. On the basis of simulation results, we suggest a control chart scheme appropriate for specific quality control environment.