A Heuristic for the Container Stacking Problem in Automated Maritime Ports

In this paper, we are interested in finding efficient practical approaches to solve the Container Stacking Problem in Maritime Ports. Given container arrivals in a container port terminal, the objective is to assign a slot to each one in a storage area at least cost with respect to pre-defined constraints. The cost is expressed in term of number of expected relocation movements. The constraints to respect are stack height, stack number, and departure dates. We propose to improve a previous heuristic model proposed by Mark B. Duinkerken and Ottjes (2001) based on the computation of an indactor called the “remaining stack capacity“.