Determination of the number of automated guided vehicles required at a semi-automated container terminal

This paper describes the development of a minimum flow algorithm to determine the number of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) required at a semi-automated container terminal. At such a terminal the containers are transported by AGVs from the quay cranes to the automated slacking cranes and vice versa. A model and a strongly polynomial time algorithm are developed to solve the case in which containers are available for transport at known time instants.