Abstract
As the core operational issue in container terminals, yard crane scheduling problem directly affects the overall operation efficiency of port connecting highway or railway transportation and sea transportation. In practice, the scheduling of yard cranes is subject to many uncertain factors, so the scheme may be inapplicable and needs to be adjusted. From the perspective of proactive strategy, considering fluctuations in arrival time of external trucks as well as varied handling volume of yard cranes, a stochastic programming model is established in this paper to obtain a fixed scheme with the minimum expected value of yard crane makespan and total task waiting time over all the scenarios. The scheme does not require rescheduling when facing different situations. Subsequently, two algorithms based on certain rules are proposed to obtain the yard crane operation scheme in the deterministic environment, which are taken as the basic solution in the uncertain conditions, and then a tailored genetic algorithm is adopted to find the optimal solution with good adaptability to the uncertain scenarios. Finally, we use small-scale examples to compare the performance of algorithms in the deterministic and uncertain environment and then analyze the relationship between different yard crane configurations and the number of tasks. Large-scale experiments are performed to study the operation efficiency of the storage yard with different handling volumes assigned to each yard crane.
Highlights
Accompanied with the development of the world economy and the increasing degree of global integration, container transportation has become an important logistics mode in international trade
We propose rule-based heuristic algorithms to obtain a basic operation scheme in the deterministic environment, according to which the initial population in uncertain environment is generated, so as to achieve the purpose of improving the solving efficiency of the algorithm
With the expansion of global economy, container throughput keeps the upward trend, in which case the effective management and scheduling of resources in container terminals is a necessary guarantee for the smooth circulation of container flow. e problem of yard crane scheduling with uncertain factors studied in this paper can adapt to the realistic situation and reduce the extra cost of scheme adjustment due to uncertain situation
Summary
Accompanied with the development of the world economy and the increasing degree of global integration, container transportation has become an important logistics mode in international trade. As an important node connecting sea and land in the process of container transportation, the ports’ throughputs have increased rapidly year by year. Yard crane is one of the key equipment and important resources in container yard, the operation efficiency of which may directly affect the scale and operation process of the whole port [1]. Yard crane scheduling scheme plays a crucial part in the operation process of containers in the port, including the handling sequences of tasks, the access time of each task, and the number of tasks assigned to yard cranes. We adopt two rule-based algorithms to generate an initial scheduling scheme with determined environment, we deal with the uncertain situations by many scenarios, and a proactive scheduling plan is produced with minimum expected value of the sum of yard crane makespan and total task waiting time over all the scenarios through a tailored genetic algorithm
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