Junqing Sun

The Design and Implementation of Berth Allocation Management System Based on MAS

Fast turnaround time of vessels and high berth productivity are paramount factors by which a container terminal holds its competitive advantage in the shipping industry. The Berth Allocation plays an important role in ensuring the terminal to have high berth productivity. Most of the methods employed to tackle berth allocation problem adopt scheduling algorithms based on centralized control. This paper introduces the application of Multi-Agent System (MAS) technology in berth allocation. The hybrid MAS structure model of berth allocation is presented and Contract Net Protocol is utilized as negotiation strategy to realize interaction and collaboration among agents. This paper also concisely addresses the design and implementation of the MAS based berth allocation management system, which can help the managers of container terminals to deal with the actual operations of berth allocation to enhance terminal productivity. The results show that the distributed control simplifies the complexity of the system, and improves the adaptability, robust and scalability.

Supply chain formation for multi-modal transport based on multi-agent

Considering the dynamics and uncertainty, this paper proposes a supply chain dynamic formation strategy of multi-modal transport based on multi-agent, which focuses on dynamic building a transportation scheme to meet the requirement of the consignor through negotiation and interaction among agents. The formation includes network initialization, network preprocessing, spatial compatibility judgment and supply chain formation. To accelerate the convergence of the negotiation process, an induction mechanism is designed, and Lagrange relaxation algorithm is also adopted to solve the temporal constrained shortest path problem. The simulation experiments show that the formation strategy can efficiently provide an effective near optimal solution for most of the instances.

On Quay Crane Allocation by the Hybrid Intelligent Approach GATS

This paper addresses the problem of quay crane allocation, a vital factor in container terminal operation. At first we take into consideration the diversity of the quay cranes at terminals in China and present an improved mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the operation of QCs according to the practical background of terminals in China. In the model the objective is to minimize the total waiting service time of the container vessels at the terminal. Then we apply the hybrid intelligent approach GATS, which combines the genetic algorithm (GA) and the tabu search strategy (TS), to solve the problem. Finally we analyze the numerical result of some simulating data cases. The numerical result reveals that the hybrid intelligent approach GATS, compared with GA, gets the satisfying approximate optimal solution with much less generations, accelerates the evolution process and avoids sinking into the local optimal solution.