A rule-based heuristic procedure for the container pre-marshalling problem

In container terminals, containers are stacked in the yard for further operations; either loading these containers to vessels or trucks. These containers have different priorities determined by many factors such as destination container terminal, and the weight of the container, and they are stacked randomly in the yard configuring an initial layout of a bay. If it is required to pick up a target container that is placed beneath to another container, extra movements should be made in order to pick up the target container. The objective of the container pre-marshalling problem is to convert an initial layout of a bay into final desired layout that is compatible with the loading schedule of this bay with minimum number of container movements. In this paper a rule-based heuristic procedure method is introduced and experimented against benchmark instances, and the results show the advantage of this method.