CONTAINERS AT THE TERMINAL: BRANCH AND BOUND METHOD

Abstract

Required quantity and performance of lifting-and-shifting machines, efficiency of handling operations as well as time of inactivity of rail rolling stock and road vehicles depend greatly on exact placement of containers within the territory of a large terminal. In order to optimize the allocation of containers the article suggests using mathematical methods, particularly the branch and bound method belonging to the traffic flow theory.

Branch and bound method is essentially reduced to targeted exhaustive search of combinations of allocation of containers in train and of addresses of empty stock places at the terminal. The use of the method permits to considerably (tenfold) reduce number of considered variants.

The practices show that it is not always necessary to search for absolute optimum solution, approximation of 95–97% is sufficient for practical tasks. If this assumption is used, then it is reasonable to limit the search by «approximately optimum solution» which can be attained in 2–3 steps of iterations.

The results of computational simulation could be used for designing and operation enhancement of container terminal, particularly to determine with more exactitude number of required truck loaders, to estimate the time necessary to handle block container train and for other purposes.