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 multi-agent 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.