The Optimization of Automated Container Terminal Scheduling Based on Proportional Fair Priority

Abstract

With the goal of maximizing the efficiency of automated container terminals, taking the loading and unloading time as the research object, the integrated optimization of automated container terminal scheduling with proportional fair priority is established by setting the priority parameters under the premise of balancing the operation efficiency of each container ship at the berth. The model considers separate assignments of general containers and special containers in the actual operation at the automated container terminal, which is never considered in other literatures. A proportional fairness algorithm (PFA) is designed to solve the problem, taking the maximum of the ratio of quantities of remaining loading and unloading containers of each container ship to the distance of empty AGVs/YTs as the proportional fair priority. The priority of all current tasks is ranked, and the highest priority task is fulfilled first. Different from the published literature, the study of this paper can be presented in two aspects. One is in the modeling. This includes (i) formalizing the description of the purpose of the model and (ii) conducting a real-world coordination of four types of equipment that incorporate at automated container terminals which considers different operations between general goods and special goods in the actual automated terminal operations. The other is that PFA is applied to deal with the integrated scheduling whose results are better with the balance of efficiency and fairness.