Dynamic Role-assignment of Transfer Cranes in a Container Terminal

概要

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A container terminal consists of many agents. They include gantry cranes, transfer cranes (TCs), internal trucks, and external trucks. Many containers are moved from the coastal terminals of Japan to inland sites and vice versa. The workload distribution among storage blocks (container stacking areas) changes over time in a container terminal. Therefore, TCs, which are mobile cranes for container handling in storage blocks, have to move appropriately among blocks according to the distribution, and the efficiency of yard operations depends heavily on the productivity of TCs. In the proposed method, we use a look-ahead methodology to determine the dynamic deployment of TCs, in which the workload distribution is estimated with simulated operations of TCs and adequate movement of TCs is obtained with searching methodology in real time. The simulation results from 10 hours of operation with 600 containers show that the proposed method can improve the efficiency of yard operations (average waiting time of trucks) by 65% in comparison to cases without movement of TCs and by 42% in comparison to the simple rule-based method. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.