This project has been developed in collaboration with ContShip Group: La Spezia Container Terminal and Medcenter Container Terminal in GioiaTauro. The project was financed by the Swiss CTI.
The
La Spezia Container Terminal is a busy terminal in the north mediterranean
which has the problem of having a limited yard space. For this reason,
improving the efficiency of crane operations is a task which affects many
sides of the terminal operations, from the yard management, to the resource
allocation, down to the single container moves [Gambardella et al. 1998]. IDSIA has analysed thecontainer flows, calibrating and validating predictive models [Bontempi et al. 1997]. The problem
of resource allocation has been formulated as a mixed integer programming
problem [Zaffalon et al. 1998b] and has been successfully solved. Finally, a flexible job shop
scheduling algorithm [Mastrolilli & Gambardella 1998] has been designed to optimese crane operations.
A detailed simulation model
of the terminal [Gambardella et al. 1998] has been implemented in the MODSIM III simulation language.
This model has been used to compare the traditional management policies
with the optimised ones, demonstrating their improved performance and robustnessin front of modified working conditions [Mastrolilli et al. 1998] [Rizzoli et al. 1999a] [Zaffalon et al. 1998a].
- Time series analysis
- Mixed integer programming
- Flexible job-shop scheduling
-
Discrete Event Simulation,
object and process oriented
This project has been developed in collaboration with Pina Petroli s.a. in Grancia.
Petroli sa in Lugano
Pina Petroli SA is a company located in Canton Ticino whose major business is to distribute oil fuel on demand in relation to orders coming directly from the final client. This service is provided using an non homogeneous fleet of vehicles, i.e. vehicles with different features in term of size, weight, tube lengths, streets accessibility and others [Gambardella et al. 1999a]. The project concerns with the
application of optimization, simulation and forecasting techniques to route and dispatch vehicles in a real environment. The system includes dynamic and stochastic models and takes into account a number of additional constraints: the dynamic arrival of the customers, stochastic demands and travel times, treatment of urgencies, multiple day scheduling, multiple time windows and accessibility restrictions. Forecasting methods are also proposed to estimate future clients demands and simulation techniques are used to evaluate multiple objectives and different scenarios.
- Metaheuristic
- Ant Systems
- Local Search
- Forecasting
- On-line Planning
- MACS-VRPTW PAGE
This project was financed
by the EU - DGVII and it has been developed by the Platform Consortium,
a group of research institutes and industries co-operating to improve the
efficiency of combined rail-road transport.
The
PLATFORM project implements an integrated (rail and road) simulation environment
for the assessment of impacts produced by the adoption of different technologies
and management policies to enhance freight intermodal terminal performances [Rizzoli et al. 1999b].
The imulation environment will be used to analyse how to make combined
transport competitive for long and even medium distance and thus lead to
a substantial reduction of road only based transport.
the analysis of the user
requirements, gathered from an in-depth literature review and from interviews
to intermodal operators through European acknowledged the need to model the
following processes:
- loading /unloading of ITUs onto/from the train;
- storage of ITUs on the yard;
- arrivals and departures of ITUs by truck.
The PLATFORM terminal simulator has been developed in MODSIM III (CACI, 1997), a commercially available process-oriented simulation language.
- Discrete Event Simulation
- Autonomous agents