Stowage Plan Based Slot Optimal Allocation in Rail-Water Container Terminal

To obtain an efficient and reasonable solution for slot allocation in rail-water container terminals,this paper develops storage optimal allocation model 1 to improve the yard space utilization,which is solved by a heuristic algorithm based on tabu search. model 2 is then built to reduce the relocation movements. a concept of fall-down problem in shunting operation plan is thus proposed to solve model 2. models 1 and 2 are tested with numerical experiments. the results show that the yard space utilization increases by 50% approximately compared to the strategy of one train piling onto a fixed area called a subblock. meanwhile the number of container relocation movements is less than five when using the fall-down problem strategy. accordingly,the models and algorithms developed in this paper are effective to improve the yard space utilization and reduce the number of container relocation movements. © 2017 yanjing li et al.