Bernard Zweers of CWI’s Stochastics group has been awarded the best presentation award at the 24th doctorate workshop of the European Logistics Association (ELA). At Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, he gave the presentation ‘Optimizing inland container terminal operations’. This presentation is based on research with Rob van der Mei and Sandjai Bhulai and in this research, algorithms are developed to move containers as efficiently as possible within a container terminal.
ELA, the European Logistics Association, is a federation of 30 national organisations, covering almost every country in Central and Western Europe as well as European Union's outermost regions, in the Caribbean (Martinique French West Indies). ELA aims to provide an international forum for networking , the promotion and development of the logistics and supply chain profession.
Abstract:
In container terminals, containers are often moved to other stacks in order to access containers that need to leave the terminal earlier. The researchers propose a new optimization model in which the containers can be moved in two different phases: a pre-processing and a relocation phase. To solve this problem, an optimal branch-and-bound algorithm is developed. Furthermore, a local search heuristic is developed because the problem is NP-hard. Besides that, a rule-based method to estimate the number of relocation moves in a bay is given. The local search heuristic produces solutions that are close to the optimal solution. Finally, for instances in which the benets of moving containers in the two different phases are in balance, the solution of the heuristic yields significant improvement compared to the existing methods in which containers are only moved in one of the two phases.
Bernard Zweers' personal homepage
ELA best presentation award jury, Bernard Zweers 4th from left.
