Planning vehicle transhipment in a seaport automobile terminal using a multi-agent system

A multi-agent system (MAS) for supporting the planning of transhipments of imported finished vehicles via a seaport is presented. The focus is on storage allocation, i.e. the allocation of parking areas for the temporary storage of vehicles, and on deployment scheduling, i.e. the allocation of drivers to the vehicles that have to be moved in the terminal area. These planning tasks, which in practice are usually carried out by different operators, are assigned to two different agent types. A further agent, the coordinator agent, is responsible for combining the local sub-plans into an overall plan in such a way that the demand for drivers in the planning period is minimised and balanced. The MAS is tested using randomly generated problem instances with different distributions of the manufacturer shares in the vehicle streams. The tests verify a certain robustness of the MAS with regard to changes in the problem data, in particular to the number of permanently employed drivers and the cost surcharge for hired drivers. In addition, the results highlight that the minimum overall (relative) costs of the drivers depends on the number of permanently employed drivers and on the level of the cost surcharge for hired drivers. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.