Lagrangian Relaxation for Scheduling of Intelligent and Autonomous Vehicles in Container Terminals Under Pairing/Unpairing Strategy

A new class of Intelligent and Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs) has been designed in the framework of Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment (InTraDe) project funded by European Commission. These vehicles which are technologically superior to the existing Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) in different technical aspects offer more flexibility and intelligence in manoeuver in the area where t he logistics operations take place. This includes the abili ty of pairing/unpairing enabling a pair of 1-TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) IAVs join and transport any size between a 1-TEU and a 1-FFE (Forty-foot Equivalent) containers. To accommodate this feature, in this article, we extend the classical mixed integer programming model of AGV scheduling in order to minimize the makespan of operations to transport a set of containers of different size between quay cranes and yard cranes. In particular, a case study on Dublin Ferryport Terminal is carried out. In order to cope with the complexity of the scheduling model, we design a Lagrangian decomposition approach utilized with variable fixing procedure and a primal solution heuristics to obtain high quality solution of instances of the problem.

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