A Fuzzy-based Heuristic Algorithm for Online Outbound Container Stacking Problem with Uncertain Weight Information

The weight information of an outbound container is often inaccurate, and it cannot be determined until its arrival at a port terminal. In order to fit all containers in a yard into the required loading sequence, re-handling operations are frequently unavoidable due to uncertainty. The planning of container storage location aims to minimize the amount of re-handling operations. We study a fuzzy logic-based heuristic algorithm for the outbound container stacking problem with uncertain weight information in this paper. Based on evaluating the lower and upper bound of re-handling, the parameters of the algorithm are tuned online in handling weight uncertainty. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is very low because it is independent from re-handling algorithms. We conduct simulations on two types of container weight datasets, uniform and standard distributions.