Abslracf-The ever-increasing demand on container porl throughput has mounted the necessity of a more efficient container storage StNCtUE, the Equirements of which apparently can be met by ASKS because of its abilities of fully automating material handling and the potentials for delivering high performance. In this study, we present an ASKS for container storage, develop the travel time models f...

Due to rapid growth in foreign trade using sea vessels, there is a growing focus in improving the infrastructure and operational efficiencies at the container terminals. Particularly, the operational responsiveness of loading and unloading of containers, affects the vessel idle times and profitability of the shipping liners. In this research, we determine optimal stack layout design, which mini...

Continuously increasing global container trade and pressure from a limited number of large shipping companies are enforcing the need for efficient container terminals. By using internal material handling resources efficiently, transfer times and operating costs are reduced. We focus our study on container terminals using straddle carriers for transportation and storage operations. We assume tha...

Due to the increase in world-wide containerized cargo transport port authorities are facing considerable pressure to increase efficiency of existing facilities. Container vessels with 18, 000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) are expected soon to create high flow peaks at container terminals. In this paper we propose a new framework for managing intermodal container terminals, based on the mo...

Production of nursery crops in the US is accomplished in containerand field-growing conditions, with propagation and seedling-rearing carried out in greenhouses; 11% of the US national farm-product is represented by these crops. Container-grown crops represent 60% of the US market and represent a highly labor-intensive and thus costly segment of ornamental crop production. The USDA, NASA and th...

Integrated scheduling of handling/storage equipment in container terminals is an NP-hard problem which has been studied during past two decades consciously. Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been applied for this optimization problem in many researches. However, the GA is vulnerable to trap in a local optima (results in premature convergence). In this paper a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is designe...