Study on Distributed Consistent Cooperative Control of Multi-ART in Automated Container Terminals

Abstract

In order to address the congestion problem of vehicles in quay of automated container terminal with parallel layout and side-loading operations, the study regards the terminal operation system as a multiagent system (MAS), and proposes a dynamic cooperative speed control schema of multi-ART(Artificial Intelligence Robot of Transportation, ) for the purpose of smart and distributed traffic control of container terminals. Via the real-time data interchange and message passing with ART group, the individual ART implements the collaborative speed regulation with the combination of the dynamic speed regulation strategy, so as to adjust the sequence of ARTs arriving at the quay which can decrease the waiting time of ARTs at the quay. Considering the consistency problem of individual and group agent among the dynamic speed regulation of ARTs, a novel distributed consensus protocol is established to assure that the individual status of ART will tend to converge basically during the collaborative speed regulation process, and the convergence of system can be guaranteed. Based on the case of automated container terminal of Tianjin Port, the paper establishes a multi-agent based simulation model, and simulates the decision-making process, and validates the effectiveness of mentioned model and strategy. The results demonstrate that the strategy can decrease the waiting time of ARTs under uncertainty environment of port and improve the operation efficiency of system.

The implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in the operations of Smart Ports in Asia Pacific during the years 2018 to 2023

“…Adicionalmente, otro ejemplo de la eficiencia de la implementación de la IA es con respecto a su aplicación en el transporte de contenedores donde podemos usar el ejemplo de Tianjin, en el cual se ha desarrollado un innovador robot de transporte de inteligencia artificial (ART) para elevar el nivel de automatización y sin la necesidad de tripulación en la terminal interior; dado que este robot se encarga del transporte horizontal de contenedores de forma autónoma, eliminando la necesidad de conductores [26]. En este caso la automatización mediante el robot ART causa una reducción en los tiempos de movimiento de contenedores y la reducción de posibles daños por los conocidos errores humanos.…”

“…En un caso de estudio sobre el uso de inteligencia artificial en los puertos marítimos de Tianjin-China, se propuso utilizar Robots de Inteligencia Artificial de Transporte (ART) para abordar los desafíos de gestión de vehículos en las terminales de contenedores, como resultado se obtuvo que estrategia permitió reducir el tiempo de espera de los ART en un 22,8% en el área de trabajo de las grúas de contenedores (QC), lo que a su vez mejoró la eficiencia general de carga y descarga en el puerto [26].…”

Sequential Distributed Model Predictive Control for Automated Mining Fleet

“…(3) (4) where is the time step. When the speed and acceleration of the truck are determined, the longitudinal force required for the truck is given in ( 5):…”

“…At present, the studies for eliminating traffic conflicts in closed areas are mainly focused on the AGV fleet in container terminals [3], [4] or logistics parks [5]- [8] and train formation in railway networks [9]- [11]. The main solutions for AGV fleets are mainly predicting potential traffic conflicts and thus changing the trajectory of the involved vehicles.…”