Storage planning for outbound container on maritime container terminals

Storage planning for outbound container is one of the most important operations in container terminals. It influences almost all successive operations, including storage position allocation for individual container, equipment scheduling, stowage planning and container relocation, etc. This paper studies storage space pre-allocation for outbound containers of arriving ships. Considering the complexity influence of random factors and the coupling relations with other subsystems, rules are collected from the real container terminals and are described in the form of constraint. The decision-making frame with mathematics model and system simulation is proposed, in which mathematics expresses are defined for clearing up objectives, variables and influencing factors of the storage plan problem, and simulation scenarios with the random factors considered are built and run to verify the mathematics model. The methods studied in this paper including constraint satisfying technique, rolling-horizon planning, hybrid approach of mathematics description and the simulation experiment, which are fit for planning problems of other complexity discrete system additionally.