Introduction

In the past few decades from 1953 to 2014, much research has been devoted to the technology of automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems, both in hardware and software. Nowadays, they have become popular over the world for automatic material handling and flexible manufacturing systems. Increasingly, these unmanned vehicles are also becoming the common mode of container transport in the seaport. The second part of this book is therefore dedicated to the advanced algorithms tackling the scheduling problem of AGVs. Although we have focused on the transport scheduling inside the port, the techniques that we developed are very general.