Military vehicle shifting in Roll-on/Roll-off terminals
研究了军用滚装码头中车辆按特性到达并需根据积载计划移位的规划问题，提出了易于实施的启发式方法，平衡了实用性和解的质量。
• Problems in military RoRo operations differ from their civilian counterparts. • Loading military vehicles necessitates a shifting process between two port areas. • We formalize and analyze a corresponding operational planning problem. • We develop heuristic approaches based on requirements from practice. • Our approaches strike a good balance between practicability and solution quality. Roll-on/Roll-off (RoRo) vessels allow the overseas transportation of vehicles that can be driven onto a ship on their own or by means of a platform vehicle. In civilian RoRo operations, vehicles are typically loaded in relatively large batches according to their destination terminals. In this article, however, we focus on a military setting, where the loading of vehicles strictly follows vehicle characteristics and involves multiple decision makers that influence the overall process. The vehicles arrive at the terminal in given sequences and need to be shifted to a parking area such that they can later be loaded onto the ship according to a given stowage plan that is related to the vehicle characteristics. We formulate the underlying operational planning problem of shifting military vehicles in a RoRo terminal and provide theoretical insights regarding its computational complexity, associated meta problems and the structure of feasible solutions. We then leverage these insights in a mathematical model and heuristic approaches that are designed to be easily implementable in practice. We evaluate the heuristics in a comprehensive computational study and derive implications and recommendations for their application in practice.