A Solution Method for an Assignment and Routing Problem of Vehicles for a Container Yard

We propose a solution method for an assignment problem and a routing problem of vehicles for a container yard. In a container yard, vehicles waiting for work often obstruct vehicles at work or traveling. We offer the solution method to generate a feasible solution finding the appropriate evaluation function, which is the total traveling time of all the vehicles in order to solve the above-mentioned problem. The proposed method has two characteristics. The first is to consider the interference between the vehicles such as deadlock and blocking. The second is to reschedule the assignment and the routing to the vehicles already planned if it is possible to minimize the total traveling time of all the vehicles. The second one is for the case where vehicles waiting for work obstruct vehicles at work or traveling. We, moreover, show the result of the simulations we carried out to confirm the capability of the proposed method. The simulations were carried out on the container yard with two-way-traffic routes. The results show that the proposed method generates a feasible solution with the appropriate traveling time of all the vehicles without deadlock among the vehicles.