Solutions To Storage Spaces Allocation Problem for Import Containers by Exact and Heuristic Methods

Abstract

Maritime transport carries out most of the world's commercial activities. One of the elements used for maritime transportation is the container. Before moving to or from a country, containers are stacked in a container terminal, also called container yard. Container terminals perform multiple and complex operations daily. Scientific community pays attention to the container stacking operations in the yard area due to its complexity and relevance in the international commerce. In this work, we solve the problem of optimizing the storage spaces allocation to imported containers by the linear mixed integer programming method. The objective of this work is to solve storage space allocation problem for imported containers, in an acceptable computational time. We use an exact optimization method for the operations of a real container yard. We model this optimization problem mathematically as a generalized assignment problem. We present the mathematical formulation, its solution, as well as the computational experiments.