Particle Swarm Optimization Using Neighborhood-Based Mutation Operator and Intermediate Disturbance Strategy for Outbound Container Storage Location Assignment Problem

Outbound container storage location assignment problem (OCSLAP) could be defined as how a series of outbound containers should be stacked in the yard according to certain assignment rules so that the outbound process could be facilitated. Considering the NP-hard nature of OCSLAP, a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is proposed. The contributions of this paper could be outlined as follows: First, a neighborhood-based mutation operator is introduced to enrich the diversity of the population to strengthen the exploitation ability of the proposed algorithm. Second, a mechanism to transform the infeasible solutions into feasible ones through the lowest stack principle is proposed. Then, in the case of trapping into the local solution in the search process, an intermediate disturbance strategy is implemented to quickly jump out of the local solution, thereby enhancing the global search capability. Finally, numerical experiments have been done and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves a better performance in solving OCSLAP.