Scheduling AGVs in ports with battery charging and swapping

Lu Zhen, Qian Zhang, Zheyi Tan and Shuaian Wang

IISE Transactions, 2025, vol. 57, issue 10, 1245-1262

Abstract: Efficient scheduling of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in automated container terminals (ACTs) is crucial to their operations management under the initiative of green port and smart port development. Facing numerous containers, a port operator needs to assign container loading/unloading tasks to AGVs, sequence the tasks for each AGV, and arrange the battery-charging or -swapping activities for the AGVs in a highly efficient manner, which affects the operational performance of the port and further impacts its annual throughput. This study proposes a mathematical model for scheduling AGVs under the battery charging–swapping mixed mode. The model should be solved in a short time, otherwise the proposed methodology cannot apply to realistic port environments. Therefore, an efficient column generation–based solution method is designed for solving the models; a novel label-setting algorithm is also proposed and embedded in the above method for solving the pricing problems in a fast way. Based on two representative ACTs (i.e., the first ACT in China and the largest ACT in the world), numerical experiments are conducted to derive some managerial insights for ACTs’ operations management on AGVs under different battery management modes.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24725854.2025.2468722 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:57:y:2025:i:10:p:1245-1262

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uiie20

DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2025.2468722

Access Statistics for this article

IISE Transactions is currently edited by Jianjun Shi

More articles in IISE Transactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().