Storage allocation in automated container terminals: the upper level

Nowadays automation is a trend of container terminals all over the world. Although not applied in current automated container terminals, storage allocation is indispensable in conventional container terminals, and promising for automated container terminals in future. This paper seeks into the storage allocation problem in automated container terminals and proposed a two level structure for the problem. A mixed integer programming model is built for the upper level, and a modified Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to solve the model. The applicable conditions of the model is investigated by numerical experiments, so as the performance of the algorithm in different problem scales. It is left to future research the lower level of the problem and the potential benefit of storage allocation to automated container terminals.