  Recently a new metaheuristic called harmony search was developed. It mimics
the behaviors of musicians improvising to find the better state harmony. In
this paper, this algorithm is described and applied to solve the container
storage problem in the harbor. The objective of this problem is to determine a
valid containers arrangement, which meets customers delivery deadlines, reduces
the number of container rehandlings and minimizes the ship idle time. In this
paper, an adaptation of the harmony search algorithm to the container storage
problem is detailed and some experimental results are presented and discussed.
The proposed approach was compared to a genetic algorithm previously applied to
the same problem and recorded a good results.
