Ant Colony Optimization for Solving the Container Stacking Problem: Case of Le Havre (France) Seaport Terminal

In this paper, the authors study the Container Stacking Problem (CSP) which is one of the most important problems in marine terminal. An optimization model is developed in order to determine the optimal storage strategy for various container-handling schedules. The objective of the model is to minimize the distance between vessel berthing location and the storage positions of containers. The CSP is solved by an efficient ant colony algorithm based on MAX-MIN ant system variant. The performance of the algorithm proposed is verified by a comparison with ILOG CPLEX for small-sized instances. In addition, numerical results for real-sized instances proved the efficiency of the algorithm.