A greedy look-ahead heuristic for the container relocation problem

Abstract

This paper addresses a classic problem in the container storage and transportation, the container relocation problem. For a given layout of a container bay, the containers should be retrieved in a predefined order, the best operation plan with fewest crane operations is going to be determined. We develop a greedy look-ahead heuristic for this particular purpose. Comparing with existing approaches presented from literature, our heuristic provides better solutions than best known solutions in shorter computational time. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.