Article ID: | iaor2001891 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 6 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 311 |
End Page Number: | 329 |
Publication Date: | May 1999 |
Journal: | International Transactions in Operational Research |
Authors: | Kozan Erhan, Preston Peter |
Keywords: | scheduling |
Optimising the container transfer schedule at the multimodal terminals is known to be NP-hard, which implies that the best solution becomes computationally infeasible as problem sizes increase. Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques are used to reduce container handling/transfer times and ships' time at the port by speeding up handling operations. The GA is chosen due to the relatively good results that have been reported even with the simplest GA implementations to obtain near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. Also discussed, is the application of the model to assess the consequences of increased scheduled throughput time as well as different strategies such as the alternative plant layouts, storage policies and number of yard machines. A real data set used for the solution and subsequent sensitivity analysis is applied to the alternative plant layouts, storage policies and number of yard machines.