An artificial intelligence planning tool for the container stacking problem

Nowadays, there exist a large competition between maritime ports, so that the improvement of customer service became a serious important problem within port container terminals which led to several sub-problems [8]. One of the performance measures is the time spent by vessels in the port quays, so that efficient management of resources in and around a port is essential. A container stack is a type of temporary store where containers await further transport by truck, train or vessel. The main efficiency problem for an individual stack is to ensure easy access to containers at the expected time of transfer. Since stacks are `last-in, first-out´, and the cranes used to relocate containers within the stack are heavily used, the stacks must be maintained in a state that minimizes on demand relocations. In this paper, we present a planning tool for finding the best configuration of containers in a bay. Thus, given a set of outgoing containers, our planning tool minimizes the number of relocations of containers in order to allocate all selected containers in an appropriate order to avoid further reshuffles. We evaluate the behavior of our tool to analyze the best configuration of yard-bays based on the number of containers, number of selected containers and tiers.