Research on Container Terminal Scheduling System Based on Multi-agent

In the near future, most container terminals will no longer be able to expand its surrounding land and will thus be unable to meet the storage requirements due to the boom in world trade. A solution is to improve utilization of the available resources. This paper presents a multi-agent theory based system for resource allocation and operation scheduling problems in container terminal to improve the productivity. The system defines distinct agent for ship, berth, quay cranes, yard crane, container truck and other factors. Solutions were determined with the intelligent character of agent and through the interaction among agents. Subsequently a partial implemented prototype of this system is given. Finally, a running instance in container terminal was simulated whose result excels the previous data to validate the feasibility of the methodology.