1. ¹Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
2. ²Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong
3. ³Singapore Management University, Singapore

Correspondence: B Rodrigues, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University, 50 Stamford Road, Singapore 178899. E-mail: br@smu.edu.sg

Received July 2004; Accepted January 2006; Published online 12 April 2006.

Abstract

In the Port of Singapore, as in many other ports, space has to be allocated in yards for inbound and transit cargo. Requests for container space occur at different times during the planning period, and are made for different quantities and sizes of containers. In this paper, we study space allocation under these conditions. We reduce the problem to a two-dimensional packing problem with a time dimension. Since the problem is NP-hard, we develop heuristic algorithms, using tabu search, simulated annealing, a genetic algorithm and 'squeaky wheel' optimization, as solution approaches. Extensive computational experiments compare the algorithms, which are shown to be effective for the problem.