A genetic algorithm to solve the storage space allocation problem in a container terminal

In this paper, an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is presented to solve an extended storage space allocation problem (SSAP) in a container terminal. The SSAP is defined as the temporary allocation of the inbound/outbound containers to the storage blocks at each time period with aim of balancing the workload between blocks in order to minimize the storage/retrieval times of containers. An extended version of a SSAP proposed in the literature is considered in this paper in which the type of container affects on making the decision on the allocation of containers to the blocks. In real-world cases, there are different types (as well as different sizes) of containers consisting of several different goods such as regular, empty and refrigerated containers. The extended SSAP is solved by an efficient GA for real-sized instances. Because of existing the several equality constraints in the extended model, the implementation of the GA in order to quick and facilitate achieve to the feasible solutions is one of the outstanding advantages of this paper. The performance of the extended model and proposed GA is verified by a number of numerical examples. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.