Automation of Container Terminal Operation by means of Coordination of Fully Autonomous Vehicles
Speaker(s)
Dr Liu Dikai, Associate Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems and Deputy Director of the Centre for Intelligent Mechatronic Systems, University of Technology, Sydney
Date
08-07-2008
Time
15:00 p.m. to 16:00 p.m.
Venue
Faculty of Engineering, Seminar Room E1-06-08, NUS
Abstract
With the increasing use of fully autonomous vehicles in container terminals and their corresponding impact on productivity, the efficient coordination and control of a large fleet of such vehicles (including task allocation and motion coordination) has also become a critical issue. The problem is very difficult to solve due to the dynamic nature of the typically bottleneck-ridden environments, very strict constraints on vehicle movement, the increased number of tasks, and importantly, the need to de-conflict the larger number of vehicles in a confined space as they undertake them.
This seminar will discuss the state-of-the-art of applications of autonomous vehicles in the automation of container port operations, efficient strategies for coordinating large autonomous vehicle teams in complex and dynamic container handling environments, and will present simultaneous approaches to task allocation and vehicle motion coordination aimed at maximising productivity of container terminals. Various algorithms applicable to this application and a parallel and distributed implementation of the algorithms will also be discussed.
Biography
Dr Dikai Liu received the B. Eng degree, M. Eng degree and the Ph.D. degree from Wuhan University of Technology, China in 1986, 1991 and 1997, respectively. He is an Associate Professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems, and a Deputy Director of the Centre for Intelligent Mechatronic Systems at the University of Technology, Sydney. His research interests include autonomous robotic systems, computational intelligence and optimization. He has been developing intelligent robotic systems to perform various tasks automatically and/or autonomously, including a large fleet of autonomous robotic systems for automation of container terminal operation and material handling.
Dr. Liu has published over 40 journal papers and 50 papers in conference proceedings, and co-authored/edited two books and five book-chapters. He is the recipient of five best paper awards and two patents. Dr. Liu is currently managing five research projects with over 1.5 million dollars research funding.
