APPLING TABU SEARCH FOR MINIMIZING RESHUFFLE OPERATIONS AT CONTAINER YARDS

The container handling operation is a critical issue that affects the throughput of the container yards. This paper focuses on determining the storage position of the reshuffled container during retrieving containers at container yards. The static problem is considered, i.e., the sequence of the retrieved containers is known, and arriving containers is not allowed during the period of retrievals. The objective of the problem is to retrieve all containers with the minimum number of reshuffles. A tabu search (TS) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem and a simple branch and bound (B&B) procedure is applied for comparison of the solution quality. 60 sets of instances are randomly generated for testing the efficiency of the proposed TS. The computational results show that the average gap between TS and B&B is 0.4% from the tested instances and the computational time is effective.

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