Flexible spacesharing strategy for storage yard m

Authors: Xinjia Jiang Ek Peng Chew Loo Hay Lee Kok Choon Tan

Publish Date: 2012/09/27

Volume: 35, Issue: 2, Pages: 417-439

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Abstract

In this paper a storage yard planning problem is studied for a transshipment port with limited space and highthroughput level Generally the consignment strategy is used in the yard for a transshipment port where containers to the same destination vessel are stored together This is to facilitate faster loading process as it reduces reshuffles as well as long distance movements of yard cranes However the consignment strategy is known to be inefficient in space utilization since each storage location must be dedicated to a particular vessel To improve the space utilization while retaining the advantage of consignment a new approach named the “flexible spacesharing strategy” is proposed The idea is that the container space can be shared by two different vessels as long as their containers do not occupy the space at the same time This strategy allows the same storage location to be reserved for two vessels The amount of space will only be allocated to a specific vessel on the arrival of corresponding containers By controlling where to stack the containers in the storage locations the containers to each vessel are not mixed and the consignment feature can be preserved This strategy is first formulated as a mixed integer program MIP As the MIP model has a block diagonal structure we develop a search algorithm which combines MIP and heuristics to find the solution The numerical experiments show that the “flexible spacesharing strategy” can handle much more containers within the same storage space compared with the “nonsharing strategy”

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