• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
• /
• v.43 no.3
• /
• pp.197-208
• /
• 2019

This paper assessed the impacts of the specification of the yard, handling equipment, and operation approaches on the expected number of re-handles during the loading operation for empty containers. When the various types of empty containers from multiple shipping liners are placed in separate spaces from each other, then the storage space cannot be fully utilized. So as to increase the utilization of the storage space, empty containers from multiple vessel liners are stored together incurring additional re-handles during the loading operation. Several formulas are derived for the estimation of the expected number of handles, including re-handles, for empty container retrieval from a bay. Transfer cranes and top handlers are utilized as handling equipment and various retrieval strategies are examined. Numerical analysis was conducted to assess the effects of various designs and operational parameters of the container stacking yard on the expected number of handles.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.25-43
• /
• 2005

In modern automated container terminals, automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems are considered a viable option for the horizontal tansportation of containers between the stacking yard and the quayside cranes. AGVs in a container terminal move rather freely and do not follow fixed guide paths. For an efficient operation of such AGVs, however, a sophisticated traffic management system is required. Although the flexible routing scheme allows us to find the shortest possible routes for each of the AGVs, it may incur many coincidental encounters and path intersections of the AGVs, leading to collisions or deadlocks. However, the computational cost of perfect prediction and avoidance of deadlocks is prohibitively expensive for a real time application. In this paper, we propose a traffic control method that predicts and avoids some simple, but at the same time the most frequently occurring, cases of deadlocks between two AGVs. More complicated deadlock situations are not predicted ahead of time but detected and resolved after they occur. Our method is computationally cheap and readily applicable to real time applications. The efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods have been validated by simulation.