An average-case asymptotic analysis of the Container Relocation Problem

The Container Relocation Problem (CRP) involves finding a sequence of moves of containers that minimizes the number of relocations needed to retrieve all containers in a given order. In this paper, we focus on average case analysis of the CRP when the number of columns grows asymptotically. We show that the expected minimum number of relocations converges to a simple and intuitive lower-bound for which we give an analytical formula.