An investigation into dynamic yard crane deployment and comparisons between hill-climbing and best-first-search algorithms

Abstract

Container terminals secure a crucial position in container transportation, including shipping and land transportation. In particular, container yard management, which involves diverse operational services, significantly affects the operational efficiency of the entire container terminal. However, it is imperative to attain an effective workload scheduling to support the dynamic deployment of yard cranes. Based on these understandings, the proposed system aims at postulating a novel strategy in terms of yard crane scheduling. In this manner, a dynamic allocation model is initially developed using integer programming for yard cranes. To resolve the NP-hard problem regarding the yard crane deployment, two heuristic algorithms, i.e., the hill-climbing algorithm and the best-first-search algorithm, are then employed. A case study on a specific container terminal yard is used for system illustration via a simulation approach. Consequently, comparisons are conducted based on the results obtained from the hill-climbing and best-first-search algorithms.