Particle swarm optimization for Integrated Yard Truck Scheduling and Storage Allocation Problem

The Integrated Yard Truck Scheduling and Storage Allocation Problem (YTS-SAP) is one of the major optimization problems in container port which minimizes the total delay for all containers. To deal with this NP-hard scheduling problem, standard particle swarm optimization (SPSO) and a local version PSO (LPSO) are developed to obtain the optimal solutions. In addition, a simple and effective `problem mapping´ mechanism is used to convert particle position vector into scheduling solution. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, experiments are conducted on different scale instances to compare the results obtained by GA. The experimental studies show that PSOs outperform GA in terms of computation time and solution quality.