Optimizing the movement of containers on the yard of a maritime container terminal

Abstract

The present paper presents the Internal Delivery Vehicle Synchronization Problem which seeks to manage the available fleet of internal delivery vehicles on a yard of a maritime container terminal in its container movement operations. The objective of this problem is to obtain the planning of the vehicles optimized in terms of working time. This optimization problem must be done in scenarios where synchronization when accessing to specific positions on the yard is required. With the goal of solving this problem from an approximate point of view, a Variable Neighbourhood Search is here proposed. The computational experiments disclose the suitable performance of this algorithmic approach, which allows to reach high-quality solutions within reasonable computational times.