Research on the Yard Schedule Agent for Importing Containers of Container Terminal

Handling flow of container terminal is a distributed complex system. It needs to break through the planed mode in advance to assign the yard position and yard crane for the importing container owing to the dynamic state and uncertainty of the handling process. The multi-agent technology, which provides the predominance of managing the real-time dynamic system, is used in the container terminal management by degrees. In this paper, firstly, the work flow of container terminal is introduced, that the traditional discharging plan method may cause the uncoordinated resource-utilization is analyzed and the improving methods are proposed; then, the system model based on the multi-agent is established, three kinds of agents - task agent, resource agent and management agent are abstracted while the analysis of yard schedule agent is emphasized; In accordance with the allocation principles of yard discharging plan, the referred key parameters in the bidding function for the yard crane are analyzed, and taking the importing container yard schedule for example, a negotiation model is designed to explain the process of the specific negotiation among each yard schedule agent. Finally, prototype system of all sorts of agents involved in a yard schedule is preliminarily established. Practice has proved that introducing the multi-agent technology into the yard schedule can improve the proportionality of yard crane operation and the efficiency of discharging.