Automated Design of Heuristics for the Container Relocation Problem

Mrko Đurasević; Mateja Đumić

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2107.13313

Automated Design of Heuristics for the Container Relocation Problem

Mrko Đurasević·Mateja Đumić

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The container relocation problem is a challenging combinatorial optimisation problem tasked with finding a sequence of container relocations required to retrieve all containers by a given order. Due to the complexity of this problem, heuristic methods are often applied to obtain acceptable solutions in a small amount of time. These include relocation rules (RRs) that determine the relocation moves that need to be performed to efficiently retrieve the next container based on certain yard properties. Such rules are often designed manually by domain experts, which is a time-consuming and challenging task. This paper investigates the application of genetic programming (GP) to design effective RRs automatically. The experimental results show that GP evolved RRs outperform several existing manually designed RRs. Additional analyses of the proposed approach demonstrate that the evolved rules generalise well across a wide range of unseen problems and that their performance can be further enhanced. Therefore, the proposed method presents a viable alternative to existing manually designed RRs and opens a new research direction in the area of container relocation problems.

Explore related subjects

cs.NE

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Mrko Đurasević, Mateja Đumić. 2021-07-28. Automated Design of Heuristics for the Container Relocation Problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13313

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Breaking the Central Bias: Spatially Partitioned Experts for Coordinate-Based Neuroevolution

Evolvable-Substrate HyperNEAT (ES-HyperNEAT), a bio-inspired indirect encoding that determines neuron placement and connection weights from spatial coordinates, exhibits a failure mode on MNIST as a diagnostic benchmark. Because input pixels map to a coordinate space centered at the origin, evolved networks converge on a small central cluster of input pixels, a spatial-concentration bias; prior work observed only 21% mean accuracy in this regime. Is this bias an optimization artifact or an architectural ceiling? Inspired by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) principles, we partition the input into non-overlapping spatial segments, each assigned to a separately evolved specialist network. With 13 such experts, this design reaches 43% mean accuracy, a 106% relative improvement over the baseline. The architectural gain does not depend on data-driven aggregation: equal-weighted averaging, which uses no validation data, already yields a 70% improvement; the gain comes from partitioning, not the weighting. Receptive-field analysis shows the mechanism: partitioning forces evolution to discover features across the entire image, expanding active pixel coverage from 4% to 79%. Absolute accuracy stays below gradient-trained baselines, but the relative gain points to central bias, not the evolutionary search. Two tools are designed to generalize beyond MNIST: a receptive-field diagnostic for silent input-coverage collapse, and a spatial-partitioning remedy that restores coverage.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

A Bio-Plausible Visual Neural Network for Locust-Inspired Collision Perception

Locust visual systems have long served as an important biological paradigm for studying looming perception and collision avoidance. Numerous computational models have successfully reproduced the selective responses of Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD) neurons to approaching objects, thereby emulating the fundamental functionality of the biological system. However, existing models remain limited in biological plausibility and robustness when operating in complex and dynamic visual environments. To address these limitations, we propose a biologically plausible neural network for locust-inspired looming detection. The proposed framework incorporates a spatially isotropic sampling strategy that mimics the ommatidial organization of the locust compound eye, a population-voting mechanism inspired by population coding in biological neural systems, and leaky integrate-and-fire neuronal dynamics to replace conventional sigmoid-based membrane activation. Systematic experiments on synthetic stimuli, laboratory sequences, and real-world driving scenarios demonstrate that the proposed model improves robustness under challenging visual conditions while preserving computational efficiency and enhancing biological fidelity. These results highlight the potential of biologically grounded neural computation for robust and efficient collision perception.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Structural Fusion of Bayesian Networks with Limited Treewidth Using Genetic Algorithms

This paper introduces an evolutionary computation approach for consensus in structural Bayesian Network (BN) fusion under the constraint of limited treewidth. The consensus BN aims to reconcile multiple input BNs into a single one that retains key structural features present in the original networks. Treewidth, a graph-based parameter associated with computationally tractable inference, is utilized to restrict the complexity of the resulting network. A genetic algorithm is proposed to look for a BN that codifies as much information about the unrestricted fusion as possible while ensuring the treewidth restriction. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the genetic algorithm's ability to obtain consensus BNs with limited treewidth, providing a valuable tool for aggregating information from diverse sources while returning a computationally actionable model.

cs.NE↗