A Critical-Shaking Neighbourhood Search for the Yard Allocation Problem

The yard allocation problem (YAP) is a real-life resource allocation problem faced by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA). As the problem is NP-hard, we propose an effective meta-heuristic procedure, named critical-shaking neighborhood search. Extensive experiments have shown that the new method can produce higher quality solutions in a much shorter time, as compared with other meta-heuristics in the literature. Further to this, it has also improved or at least achieved the current best solutions to all the benchmark instances of the problem. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.