A hybrid metaheuristic method for dispatching automated guided vehicles in container terminals

To reduce the turnaround time of a vessel in a container terminal, the performance of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) which carry on the transportation of containers between quayside and yard is crucial. A good dispatching strategy for AGVs should be able to minimize the waiting or idle time of the quay cranes by assigning vehicles to loading or unloading jobs with a minimum total delay time. The AGVs dispatching problem discussed in this paper include the consideration of propagated tardiness. A delay in one job may affect all the subsequent jobs served by the same quay crane. To handle this assignment problem, we propose a hybrid metaheuristic method. This hybrid method is tested with simulations on a container management system and the results are compared with a greedy method. The hybrid method outperforms the greedy method with obvious improvement. Further comparison between the proposed hybrid method and other hybrid methods proves the robustness of this hybrid method.