Agent-based models are increasingly being used to simulate and analyze various transportation problems, from traffic flow [15] to air traffic control [1]. One transportation industry that has not received as much attention from the multi-agent systems community is seaport container terminals. It can be argued that the operations that take place at a container terminal are as complex as that of ...

Container transportation plays a key role in the process largely because of the numerous technical and economic advantages it provides over traditional methods of water transportation. Compared with traditional port operations, containerization has greatly improved performance of port production. Many container ports no longer enjoy the freedom yielded by a monopoly over the handling of cargo f...

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2008.05.033 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 216 395 1064; fa E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Celik). The strategic positions and geographical advantages of the Turkish container ports in the world transportation network create an excessive demand which seek urgent development strategies for managing ongoing problems ...

Because transportation services provided by container lines to forwarders cannot be stored, they can be considered to be newsvendor-type products. This paper discusses a method used to optimize container lines’ freight tariffs in order to maximize their expected profit by considering changes in order quantities made by forwarders responding to the price schemes suggested by the container lines....

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...

An integrated heuristic approach based on genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed for solving the container selection and loading problems. The GA for container selection solves a two-dimensional knapsack problem, determining a set of containers to minimize the transportation or shipment cost. The GA for container loading solves for the weighted coefficients in the evaluation functions that are ap...

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...

In recent years, the scale of container transportation and the size of vessels are becoming larger and larger; development of automatic container cranes becomes a necessity. As a key function of automatic control of unmanned cranes, the optimum route can minimize the cycle time by calculating the most efficient combination of horizontal and vertical motions of container loading/unloading. In th...