Improved rehandling strategies for the container retrieval process

SUMMARY The breakdown of trade barriers among countries led to an enormous increase in the volume of international trade. Consequently, the amount of bulk cargo carried in containers and transported overseas exploded because of flexibility and reliability of this type of transportation. So, the efficiency in container terminals has emerged as a major problem. In this work, we deal with an operational problem in container terminals. We try to develop strategies to minimize the total time required to retrieve the containers from a bay in a predetermined sequence. The problem is solved optimally using a branch and bound‐based algorithm, and alternative heuristics that give near‐optimal solutions are proposed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.