Optimization of container relocation operations in port container terminals

The relocation of containers is a crucial operation in container ports all around the world. The Container Relocation Problem (CRP) is focused upon to find a sequence of container retrievals in a defined order from a single yard container bay with a minimum number of relocations. The goal of this paper is to find out if Genetic Algorithm (GA) can give new insights in the problem of solving the CRP. In this paper we focus on the two-dimensional, static, offline and restricted CRP of real-world yard container bays. Four rules are proposed for determining the position of relocated containers. We applied GA to find the best sequence of container retrievals according to these four rules in order to minimize the number of relocations within the bay. The experimental testing was run on a total of 800 different instances with varying bay sizes and number of containers. The given results are compared with the results of different authors using other heuristic methods. The results show that the proposed model solves CRP and achieves near optimal solutions. First published online 9 December 201