Optimization of Containers Transfer in Le Havre Port: a New Algorithm for the Railway Transportation System

Abstract : This paper introduces the rail shuttle routing problem with synchronization constraints in which rail shuttles carry out the transfer of containers between maritime terminals and the multimodal terminal of the Le Havre Port. A rail shuttle is composed of two types of vehicles: a locomotive which is an autonomous vehicle able to move between container terminals, and a block of flatcars which is considered as a non-autonomous vehicle that requires to be hitched to a locomotive to move in space. The objective is to minimize empty travel times of autonomous vehicles between container terminals with respecting the synchronization needs between the routing of both types of vehicles to perform the transfer of containers within time windows constraints imposed on task availability. A mathematical formulation of the problem is established and an ant colony algorithm is proposed to solve the problem.