Research on real-time export container allocation considering loading efficiency

Determining where to stack the containers on the storage yard of a container terminal is an important problem, because it will make a great importance on the loading efficiency. In order to minimize the container relocation times and the average transportation distance of containers, we propose a penalty based strategy for real-time container allocation. When the sequence of containers arriving at the storage yard is uncertain, this strategy can allocate the location for a single container when it arrives, so as to minimize the container relocation times and transportation distance during shipment as a whole. Experiments show that this strategy can get a relatively good result.