  Minimizing the number of reshuffling operations at maritime container
terminals incorporates the Pre-Marshalling Problem (PMP) as an important
problem. Based on an analysis of existing solution approaches we develop new
heuristics utilizing specific properties of problem instances of the PMP. We
show that the heuristic performance is highly dependent on these properties. We
introduce a new method that exploits a greedy heuristic of four stages, where
for each of these stages several different heuristics may be applied. Instead
of using randomization to improve the performance of the heuristic, we
repetitively generate a number of solutions by using a combination of different
heuristics for each stage. In doing so, only a small number of solutions is
generated for which we intend that they do not have undesirable properties,
contrary to the case when simple randomization is used. Our experiments show
that such a deterministic algorithm significantly outperforms the original
nondeterministic method when the quality of found solutions is observed, with a
much lower number of generated solutions.
