Dispatching Vehicles in a Mega Container Terminal

We consider a container terminal discharging and uploading containers to and from ships. The discharged containers are stored at prespecified storage locations in the terminal yard. Containers are moved between the ship area and the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one contain...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: BISH, Ebru K., CHEN, Frank Y., LEONG, Thin Yin, Nelson, Barry L., NG, Jonathan W. C., SIMCHI-LEVI, David
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2005
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1175
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2174/viewcontent/DispatchingVehiclesInAMegaContainerT_afv.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:We consider a container terminal discharging and uploading containers to and from ships. The discharged containers are stored at prespecified storage locations in the terminal yard. Containers are moved between the ship area and the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the total time it takes to serve a ship, which is the total time it takes to discharge all containers from the ship and upload new containers onto the ship. We develop easily implementable heuristic algorithms and identify both the absolute and asymptotic worst-case performance ratios of these heuristics. In simple settings, most of these algorithms are optimal, while in more general settings, we show, through numerical experiments, that these algorithms obtain near-optimal results for the dispatching problem.