Addressing the container retrieval problem through an efficient heuristic algorithm

In this study, an efficient heuristic for the container retrieval problem is proposed. Given the initial layout of a container terminal with a bay, this problem aims at obtaining a movement sequence for the crane to retrieve all the containers arranged in a specified order. To this purpose, a computationally efficient heuristic, called constant summation (CSUM), is developed to minimize the total crane s working time required to retrieve all the containers from a given bay. Numerical results show that the CSUM is very promising compared to the best known approaches recently presented in the literature.