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A Branch and Price Procedure for the Container Premarshalling Problem

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Algorithms - ESA 2014 (ESA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8737))

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Abstract

During the loading phase of a vessel, only the containers that are on top of their stack are directly accessible. If the container that needs to be loaded next is not the top container, extra moves have to be performed, resulting in an increased loading time. One way to resolve this issue is via a procedure called premarshalling. The goal of premarshalling is to reshuffle the containers into a desired lay-out prior to the arrival of the vessel, in the minimum number of moves possible. This paper presents an exact algorithm based on branch and bound, that is evaluated on a large set of instances. The complexity of the premarshalling problem is also considered, and this paper shows that the problem at hand is NP-hard, even in the natural case of stacks with fixed height.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Martijn van Brink & Ruben van der Zwaan

Authors
  1. Martijn van Brink
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  2. Ruben van der Zwaan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Andreas S. Schulz

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Kaiserstruhe 12, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Dorothea Wagner

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van Brink, M., van der Zwaan, R. (2014). A Branch and Price Procedure for the Container Premarshalling Problem. In: Schulz, A.S., Wagner, D. (eds) Algorithms - ESA 2014. ESA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8737. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44777-2_66

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44777-2_66

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44776-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44777-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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