A reverse logistics problem, motivated by many real-life applications, is examined where bottles/cans in which products are delivered from a processing depot to customers in one period are available for return to the depot in the following period. The picked-up bottles/cans need to be adjusted in the place of delivery load. This problem is termed as simultaneous delivery and pick-up problem wit…
Trucks are the most popular transport equipment in most mega-terminals, and scheduling them to minimize makespan is a challenge that this article addresses and attempts to resolve. Specifically, the problem of scheduling a fleet of trucks to perform a set of transportation jobs with sequence dependent processing times and different ready times is investigated, and the use of a genetic algorithm…
From the perspective of supply chain management, the selected carrier plays an important role in freight delivery. This article proposes a new criterion of multi-commodity reliability and optimises the carrier selection based on such a criterion for logistics networks with routes and nodes, over which multiple commodities are delivered. Carrier selection concerns the selection of exactly one ca…
This paper addresses a cross-dock operations problem in space-constrained industrial logistics distribution hubs. In these hubs, the number of incoming trucks exceeds the number of docks available, and inbound trucks and orders arrive at random. The solution lies in minimising the waiting time of trucks by coordinating the pick up/delivery sequences of inbound and outbound orders in the storage…
The Tactical Berth Allocation Problem (TBAP) aims to allocate incoming ships to berthing positions andassign quay crane profiles to them (i.e. number of quay cranes per time step). The goals of the TBAPare both the minimization of the housekeeping costs derived from the transshipment container flowsbetween ships, and the maximization of the total value of the quay crane profiles assigned to the…
Dual cycling is an operation technique whereby quay cranes perform loading and unloading operations simultaneously in the same ship bay. In this article, a mixedinteger programming model for quay crane dual-cycling scheduling is developed. The model considers the stowage plan of outbound containers and the operation sequence of quay cranes. To solve the model, a heuristic method, called bi-leve…
In green logistics operation, all logistics processes form a bidirectional closed-loop topology. In order to model and optimize such a kind of structure, a standardized closed-loop logistics operation reference model is built which aims to provide supply chain managers with general analysis. Based on the reference model, potential risks of closed-loop logistics chain can be analyzed including n…
Optimising the container transfer schedule at the multimodal terminals is known to be NP-hard, which implies that the best solution becomes computationally infeasible as problem sizes increase. Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques are used to reduce container handling/transfer times and ships' time at the port by speeding up handling operations. The GA is chosen due to the relatively good results …
A multi-agent system (MAS) for supporting the planning of transhipments of imported finished vehicles via a seaport is presented. The focus is on storage allocation, i.e. the allocation of parking areas for the temporary storage of vehicles, and on deployment scheduling, i.e. the allocation of drivers to the vehicles that have to be moved in the terminal area. These planning tasks, which in pra…
One of the most important operations in marine container terminals is quay crane scheduling. The quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP) involves scheduling groups of containers to be loaded and unloaded by each quay crane. It also requires addressing practical issues such as minimum spacing between quay cranes and precedence relationships between container groups. This study addresses the QCSP wi…
In this paper, an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is presented to solve an extended storage space allocation problem (SSAP) in a container terminal. The SSAP is defined as the temporary allocation of the inbound/outbound containers to the storage blocks at each time period with aim of balancing the workload between blocks in order to minimize the storage/retrieval times of containers. An exten…
A dry bulk terminal acts as a multi-modal interface for transhipping iron ores. Stacker reclaimers are the dedicated equipments in storage yard for iron ore handling. Both unloading and loading processes are supported by stackerreclaimers in most cases. The operation efficiency of dry terminals heavily depends on the productivity of stackerreclaimers. This paper discusses the stacker-reclaimer …
Supply chain research can lead to an increase in efficiency, business integration, responsiveness and ultimately market competitiveness. In the sugar industry, such research has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, and has been motivated by low world sugar prices and rising costs of production. However, in the present competitive business environment, a more customer-driven and holistic…