A Simulation Based Meta-Heuristic Approach For The Inbound Container Housekeeping Problem In The Automated Container Terminals

We study an inbound container housekeeping problem in an automated container terminal. We propose an integer programming model to characterize the problem and provide a meta-heuristic algorithm to solve it. To tackle the random factors in the future retrieval process, a simulation module is embedded in the process of evaluating the objective value. By computational experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Moreover, we also conduct sensitivity analysis to examine the impacts of different algorithm parameters.