Distributed agent architecture for port automation

In the near future, container ports will no longer be able to expand into the surrounding land and will thus be unable to meet the storage requirements due to the boom in world trade. A solution to this problem is to increase the container throughput of the port by reducing the amount of time necessary to load and unload a ship. This paper presents a distributed agent architecture to achieve this task. Under such architecture, an intelligent planning algorithm is continuously optimised by the dynamic and co-operative rescheduling of yard resources such as quay cranes and container vehicles.