A BEAM SEARCH ALGORITHM FOR MINIMIZING RESHUFFLE OPERATIONS AT CONTAINER YARDS

The container relocation at container yards will influence the yard operator efficiency. The problem we tackled is to retrieval all containers from an initial configuration of given number of bays and tiers with minimum number of relocations. There is no new arriving container and only the containers in the same stack above the retrieved container can be relocated. We propose a beam search (BS) algorithm that is similar to the breadth-first branch-andbound scheme, but only few permitted nodes in each level are kept for the further search. In order to select permitted nodes in each level, a look-ahead heuristic is applied for evaluation. We randomly generate 1920 instances with different configurations to test our BS algorithm. The results show that our BS algorithm can obtain optimal solutions in small size instances and near optimal solutions in larger size instances within effective computation time.

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