Models and algorithms for a yard crane scheduling problem in container ports

Abstract

This paper addresses the scheduling of a yard crane in an automated container block, considering its relationships with the other terminal subsystems. Containers coming into the block to be stored have release times, indicating the moment at which they arrive from ships or trucks. Containers being retrieved have due times, indicating when they will be required by other subsystems. The problem can be seen as a pickup routing problem and also as a one-machine scheduling problem. As a starting point, integer linear models were developed for both approaches. Then, to obtain good solutions for large instances, several heuristic algorithms, coupled with a local search, were proposed. An extensive computational study, based on a newly generated benchmark, shows the limits of the exact methods and the quality of the solutions obtained by the heuristics.