Heuristic-based Model for Container Stacking Problem

The paper presents a container stacking model that simulates, solves and optimizes the container stacking activity within a fluvial or maritime port. This activity constitutes a real world problem that is omnipresent in logistic and transportation domain. Given container arrivals in a container port terminal, the objective is to assign a slot to each one in a storage area at least cost with respect to pre-defined constraints. The cost is expressed in term of expected relocation movement number. The constraints to respect are stack height, stack number, and departure dates. The aim of the proposed model is to help operative management personnel by giving a stacking plan for each container. To this end, two centralized algorithms were presented: the first is an uninformed search algorithm and the second is an informed search algorithm based on heuristics. By comparing them, it is shown that the latter performs much better than the former thanks to the adopted heuristics.