Intelligent heuristic techniques for the optimization of the transshipment and storage operations at maritime container terminals

This paper summarizes the main contributions of the Ph.D. thesis of Christopher Expósito-Izquierdo. This thesis seeks to develop a wide set of intelligent heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms aimed at solving some of the most highlighted optimization problems associated with the transshipment and storage of containers at conventional maritime container terminals. Under the premise that no optimization technique can have a better performance than any other technique under all possible assumptions, the main point of interest in the domain of maritime logistics is to propose optimization techniques superior in terms of effectiveness and computational efficiency to previous proposals found in the scientific literature when solving individual optimization problems under realistic scenarios. Simultaneously, these optimization techniques should be enough competitive to be potentially implemented in practice. © IBERAMIA and the authors.