Solutions To Storage Spaces Allocation Problem for Import Containers by Exact and Heuristic Methods

Resumen

Maritime transport carries out most of the world’s commercial activities. One of the elements most used for maritime transportation is the container. Before being transported, operators stack containers in a container terminal, also called containers yard. The container terminals demand multiple and complex stacking operations daily. Therefore, the scientific community has paid attention to the container stacking operations in the yard area. In this work, we compare the performance of two methods, the integer linear programming method and a metaheuristic method as solutions to the problem of optimizing the storage space allocation to imported containers regarding the optimization value and the computational time. We model this optimization problem as ageneralized assignment problem. Finally, we presentthe mathematical formulations, their solutions, and our experiments; resulting in a mixed solution of both methods, depending on the size of the containers terminal.