A Fuzzy-based Heuristic Algorithm for Online Outbound Container Stacking Problem with Uncertain Weight Information

Jiawei Li, Can Zhou, Kejia Wu, Ruibin Bai

Abstract: The weight information of an outbound container is often inaccurate, and it cannot be determined until its arrival at a port terminal. In order to fit all containers in a yard into the required loading sequence, re-handling operations are frequently unavoidable due to uncertainty. The planning of container storage location aims to minimize the amount of re-handling operations. We study a fuzzy logic-based heuristic algorithm for the outbound container stacking problem with uncertain weight information in this paper. Based on evaluating the lower and upper bound of re-handling, the parameters of the algorithm are tuned online in handling weight uncertainty. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is very low because it is independent from re-handling algorithms. We conduct simulations on two types of container weight datasets, uniform and standard distributions.