An Improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for Tugboat Scheduling Problem in Container Terminal

Effective scheduling has a significant effect on efficiency in container terminals. This paper proposes a model of tugboat scheduling and applies an improved Discrete Chaos Particle Swarm Optimization (DCPSO) algorithm to solve this problem. DCPSO orders the position vector of particles to get a discrete scheduling solution. Moreover, chaos search can get all the states in the search space by the rules of itself and generate neighbourhoods of near-optimal solutions to maintain solution diversity. Embedding chaos search as a local search method into PSO can prevent the search process from becoming premature. The results of simulation optimization experiments suggest that the improved DCPSO algorithm in this paper is well suited for tugboat scheduling in practice in container terminal.