A New Software System for Optimizing the Operations at a Container Terminal

This paper describes the procedures implemented in the software sys-tem developed for the CONTRAST project to optimize the logistic operations at acontainer terminal. In particular, we consider the problems of minimizing the num-ber of reshuffle operations and designing the routes of the vehicles inside the yard.Minimizing the number of reshuffle operations required to empty a container yardis addressed in the literature as the Block Relocation Problem and it is known tobe NP-hard. Here we implemented two heuristic procedures that provide feasiblesolutions to the problem when new containers enter the yard or when some containermust be reallocated for any reason