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Agent-Based Container Terminal Optimisation

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6973))

Abstract

Container terminals play a critical role in international shipping and are under pressure to cope with increasing container traffic. The problem of managing container terminals effectively has a number of characteristics which make agents a suitable technology to consider applying. Container terminals involve the operation of distributed entities (e.g. quay cranes, straddle carriers) which coordinate to achieve competing goals in a dynamic environment. This paper describes a joint industry-university project which has explored the applicability of agent technology to the domain of container terminal management. We describe a simulation platform of a container terminal based on the JADE agent framework, along with two optimisations that have been developed and integrated with the simulator: allocating container moves to machines through negotiation, and allocating containers to yard locations through an evolutionary algorithm.

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Winikoff, M. et al. (2011). Agent-Based Container Terminal Optimisation. In: Klügl, F., Ossowski, S. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6973. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24603-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24603-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24602-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24603-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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