A multi-heuristic approach for solving the pre-marshalling problem

Raka Jovanovic (), Milan Tuba and Stefan Voß ()
Additional contact information
Raka Jovanovic: Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, Hamad bin Khalifa University
Milan Tuba: Megatrend University Belgrade
Stefan Voß: University of Hamburg

Central European Journal of Operations Research, 2017, vol. 25, issue 1, No 1, 28 pages

Abstract: Abstract Minimizing the number of reshuffling operations at maritime container terminals incorporates the pre-marshalling problem (PMP) as an important problem. Based on an analysis of existing solution approaches we develop new heuristics utilizing specific properties of problem instances of the PMP. We show that the heuristic performance is highly dependent on these properties. We introduce a new method that exploits a greedy heuristic of four stages, where for each of these stages several different heuristics may be applied. Instead of using randomization to improve the performance of the heuristic, we repetitively generate a number of solutions by using a combination of different heuristics for each stage. In doing so, only a small number of solutions is generated for which we intend that they do not have undesirable properties, contrary to the case when simple randomization is used. Our experiments show that such a deterministic algorithm significantly outperforms the original nondeterministic method. The improvement is twofold, both in the quality of found solutions, and in the computational effort.

Keywords: Pre-marshalling; Logistics; Container terminal; Heuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10100-015-0410-y

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