Rashidi, H. and Tsang, E.P.K., Vehicle Scheduling in Port Automation, 3rd Edition, 2022, CRC Press

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1032306173
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1032306179
eBook ISBN: 9781003308386
Published on 10 August 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003308386

First edition was published by VDM Verlag, 2010
2015 edition was published by CRC Press

This book is a scientific document of a solid piece of research. It is divided into two major parts, the optimisation problems faced by today’s modern container terminals, in general, and the advanced algorithms to tackle the scheduling of automated guided vehicles, in particular.

The research reported in this book developed a complete package for the scheduling problems of AGVs in ports, which was formulated as a Minimum Cost Flow Model. Although we focused on the vehicle scheduling problem in ports, the techniques that we developed are very general.

This book is useful for port authorities and researchers, including specialists and graduate students in operation research. For specialists, it provides novel and efficient algorithms for network flow problems. For students, it provides the most comprehensive survey of the field. It also provides a rigorous formulation of the problems in port automation.


More about this book:

This book is a scientific report of a solid piece of research. It is useful for port authorities and researchers, including specialists and graduate students in operations research. The aim of publishing this book is to publicise our work, which advances state-of-the-art algorithms in network flow problems. For students, it provides the most comprehensive survey of the field. It also provides a rigorous formulation of the problems in port automation. For specialists, it provides novel and efficient algorithms for network flow problems.

This book is divided into two major parts, the optimisation problems faced by today's modern container terminals, in general, and the advanced algorithms to tackle the scheduling of automated guided vehicles, in particular. Although we focused on the vehicle scheduling problem in ports, the techniques that we developed are rather general.

We surveyed literature over problems in container terminal. The problems are classified into five scheduling decisions. For each of the decisions an overview of the literature is presented. After that, each of the decisions is formulated as Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation Problems (CSOPs). The literature also includes solutions, implementations and performance. The solutions are classified and summarised.

We then extend the Network Simplex Algorithm, the fastest algorithm to solve the Minimum Cost Flow problem, and found out four advanced algorithms. In order to verify and validate the algorithms, we chose one of the challenging problems in ports, the scheduling problem of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in container terminals.

This research develops a complete package for the scheduling problems of AGVs in ports. The problem divulges two types, static and dynamic. In static problems, where there is no change in situation, the challenge is to find out more efficient and faster algorithms to tackle the large scale problems. In dynamic problems, the challenge is to respond to the changes while solving the new problem faster. The algorithms developed in this book are also two types, complete and incomplete. The complete algorithms find out the global solution for the problem, whereas the incomplete algorithms find out a local optimum solution. The experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithms on a large number of generated instances of the problem and the results presented were of high quality.

Related book: Foundations of constraint satisfaction