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Solving the Robust Container Pre-Marshalling Problem

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Computational Logistics (ICCL 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9855))

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Abstract

Container terminals across the world sort the containers in the stacks in their yard in a process called pre-marshalling to ensure their efficient retrieval for onward transport. The container pre-marshalling problem (CPMP) has mainly been considered from a deterministic perspective, with containers being assigned an exact exit time from the yard. However, exact exit times are rarely known, and most containers can at best be assigned a time interval in which they are expected to leave. We propose a method for solving the robust CPMP (RCPMP) to optimality that computes a relaxation of the robust problem and leverages this within a solution procedure for the deterministic CPMP. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on a dataset of 900 RCPMP instances, finding solutions in many cases in under a second.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A group is called a priority in [4, 5] and referred to as an exit time in [19].

  2. 2.

    We note that it may be possible that some of these instances do not have a solution in which there are absolutely no misoverlays.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC\(^2\)) for the use of their high-throughput cluster. We also thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Decision Support and Operations Research Lab, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Kevin Tierney

  2. Institute of Information Systems, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Stefan Voß

Authors
  1. Kevin Tierney
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  2. Stefan Voß
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Correspondence to Kevin Tierney .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Paias

  2. University of Vienna , Vienna, Austria

    Mario Ruthmair

  3. University of Hamburg , Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Stefan Voß

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Tierney, K., Voß, S. (2016). Solving the Robust Container Pre-Marshalling Problem. In: Paias, A., Ruthmair, M., Voß, S. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9855. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44896-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44896-1_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44895-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-44896-1

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