A Multi-Heuristic Approach for Solving the Pre-Marshalling Problem

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-heuristic, deterministic approach for the Pre-Marshalling Problem that outperforms traditional methods by exploiting problem properties and combining heuristics in a staged greedy framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-heuristic greedy method that reduces solution randomness and improves solution quality for the Pre-Marshalling Problem.

Findings

Deterministic multi-heuristic approach outperforms nondeterministic methods.

Exploiting problem properties enhances heuristic performance.

Fewer solutions are needed to achieve high-quality results.

Abstract

Minimizing the number of reshuffling operations at maritime container terminals incorporates the Pre-Marshalling Problem (PMP) as an important problem. Based on an analysis of existing solution approaches we develop new heuristics utilizing specific properties of problem instances of the PMP. We show that the heuristic performance is highly dependent on these properties. We introduce a new method that exploits a greedy heuristic of four stages, where for each of these stages several different heuristics may be applied. Instead of using randomization to improve the performance of the heuristic, we repetitively generate a number of solutions by using a combination of different heuristics for each stage. In doing so, only a small number of solutions is generated for which we intend that they do not have undesirable properties, contrary to the case when simple randomization is used. Our experiments show that such a deterministic algorithm significantly outperforms the original nondeterministic method when the quality of found solutions is observed, with a much lower number of generated solutions.