Description

This book is a scientific document of a solid piece of research. It is divided into two major parts, the optimization problems faced by today's modern container terminals, in general, and the advanced algorithms to tackle the scheduling of automated guided vehicles, in particular. The research reported in this book developed a complete package for the scheduling problems of AGVs in ports, which was formulated as a Minimum Cost Flow Model. Although we focused on the vehicle scheduling problem in ports, the techniques that we developed are very general. This book is useful for port authorities and researchers, including specialists and graduate students in operation research. For specialists, it provides novel and efficient algorithms for network flow problems. For students, it provides the most comprehensive survey of the field. It also provides a rigorous formulation of the problems in port automation.