Cuckoo Search for the Resolution of the Container Storage Problem

Introduction

Containerization is the use of containers in the transport of goods in maritime transport. This process began in the 1960s and became global in the 1980s. It aims to reduce shipping costs by minimizing handling costs. Containerization consists of storing goods in containers of different standardized sizes. The purpose of this process is to facilitate storage and improve the efficiency and speed of transport by reducing packaging and handling requirements at all points of transfer between the port, rail and road tracks. Containerization has played an important role in the increase in global maritime traffic.

Nowadays, all Port managers in the world are facing a serious challenge such as the best management of the container storage area.

In this article, the authors focus on the problem of storing containers in a seaport. As a result, several questions arise:

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  How can we ensure better movement of the containers in the storage area?

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  How to determine the correct location for the containers in the storage area arriving at a terminal? And who are staying temporarily?

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  How to minimize the waiting time for ships?

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  How should we proceed to reduce storage costs?

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  How should we proceed in order to increase the storage capacities?

All these questions arise at the level of the various activities carried out in a container port, and constitute objectives of concern to theorists and practitioners.

The objective of this work is to minimize the cost and increase the efficiency of transport companies by minimizing the time occupied by a container or a ship in a port. This amounts to revising the placement of containers in the storage area (taking into account the arrival of ships or import containers) by minimizing the number of unnecessary movements by taking into account constraints such as: the departure date of of the container, the torage cost sand the number of movements.

In this work, the main objective is to find a solution for the container storage problem in the seaport by developing a bio inspired optimization method that decreases the cost and increases the efficiency of the transport companies by minimizing the time occupied by a container or ship in a port.

This article is structured as follows: the authors start with a state of the art on the container storage problem explaining recent research in this area followed by the proposed approach. In section 3, the authors detail a case study of the experimentation part of this work followed by a comparative study. The authors end with a conclusion on the proposed work and some futurs research directions .

Literature Review

The management of the storage area has attracted the attention of researchers and a significant effort has been made in this area. The container storage problem is one of NP difficult problems

In this section the authors present recent works related to the container storage problem, and make an analysis of the literature related to this work. These works are presented in chronological order.

Yachba et al (2016): the authors of this work, dealed with the container storage problem using the genetic algorithm and taking into account the constraints such as: the distance and the type of containers, a particular type of containers has been treated in this work (hazardous containers) (Yachba et al, 16).

Gang et al (2016) Proposed the linear programming algorithm and the heuristic approach, the authors of this work concluded that the heuristic approach is more efficient than CPLEX which produces solutions in a few minutes and allows to reduce costs (Gang et al, 2016).

Huang et al (2017) studied the problem of stowage of container ships, They presented GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure) which is an evolutionary heuristic algorithm to solve the problem of stowage planning. The approaches were able to find high quality planning solutions in two seconds (Huang et al.,17).