Authors:
Mohamed ElWakil
1
;
Mohamed Gheith
1
;
2
and
Amr Eltawil
1
Affiliations:
1
Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, School of Innovative Design Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Egypt
;
2
Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Egypt
Keyword(s):
Salp Swarm Algorithm, Container Terminals, Container Stacking Problem, Simulated Annealing.
Abstract:
In container terminals, the shipping containers are stored temporarily in yards in the form of bays composed of vertical stacks and horizontal rows. When there is a need to retrieve a target container, it may not be located on the top of its stack, in such a case, the containers above it are called blocking containers. These blocking containers should be relocated first in order to retrieve the target container. These relocations introduce an extra workload and a challenge to the container terminal efficiency. In the Container Stacking Problem (CSP), a group of containers are to be stacked in a given bay, while considering the future retrieval of these containers with minimum number of relocations. In this paper, a new hybrid Salp Swarm-Simulated Annealing Algorithm (SSSA) is proposed for solving the NP hard CSP. The contributions of this paper are as follows, first, and for the first time, a discrete optimization version of the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is proposed. The algorithm i
s different from the original continuous optimization one. Second, the SSA performance is enhanced with a simulated annealing algorithm to improve its exploration capability. In order to examine the performance of the proposed algorithm, computational experiments were performed on benchmark instances that illustrated the competitive performance of the SSSA with respect to the optimal solutions of the instances.
(More)