A Hybrid Method for Assigning Containers to AGVs in the Dynamic Environment of Container Terminals

International audienceThe handling operations performed in ports require the use of equipment operating in a dynamic environment. Some tasks may not be fully carried out due to equipment failure or power breakdown that may occur particularly with the automated guided vehicles (AGV). The unavailability of equipment such as AGV has important consequences in terms of respecting the deadlines of different operations that a port should perform, such as the loading and unloading operations of ships. This situation can aggravate if there are also traffic problems in the port with some inaccessible network nodes. A part of the equipment will be blocked or the operations will take longer than expected if they don`t take the optimal path to connect the loading/unloading points and storage areas. These reasons confirm the usefulness of establishing a robust system able to resolve the problem of assigning containers in the static and dynamic environments. In a previous work, we developed a system for assigning containers in a static environment. In order to improve this method, we devote this paper to the study of the robustness of our system to the dynamic environment of the port. The numerical tests included in this paper show an adequate performance of our method for this particular dynamic environment