A study of the sensitivity of sequence stacking strategies for the storage location assignment problem for out-bound containers in a maritime terminal

Recently, a new approach to solve the outbound container location problem motivated by the Shanghai maritime terminals was published. This approach addresses the problem by decomposing it into two stages. The first stage is a mathematical programming model and the second stage is a heuristic algorithm whose objective is to minimize the total reshuffle movements executed during the loading operation. That study reports that the diagonal stacking configuration provides the best performance. Conversely, this paper documents the results of a study to observe the performance of the various staking strategies under different conditions that can occur regularly in real ports. The parameters that are varied are the number of tiers in each stack, the number of container weight levels, and the permitted bay utilization. The results show that although the diagonal stacking strategy does provide the best performance under some conditions, it does not yield the best performance in other parameter combinations. The horizontal strategy is found to perform best for most of the parameter combinations considered in this study.