A New Software System for Optimizing the Operations at a Container Terminal

This paper describes the procedures implemented in the software system developed for the CONTRAST project to optimize the logistic operations at a container terminal. In particular, we consider the problems of minimizing the number of reshuffle operations and designing the routes of the vehicles inside the yard. Minimizing the number of reshuffle operations required to empty a container yard is addressed in the literature as the Block Relocation Problem and it is known to be NP-hard. Here we implemented two heuristic procedures that provide feasible solutions to the problem when new containers enter the yard or when some container must be reallocated for any reason.