Abstract
Making operational plans for Yard Cranes (YCs) to enhance port efficiency has become vital issues for the container terminals. This paper discusses the load-scheduling problem of multiple YCs. The problem is to schedule two YCs at different container blocks, which serve the loading operations of one quay crane so as to minimize the total distance of visiting paths and the make-span at stack area. We consider the container handling time, the YC visiting time, and the waiting time of each YC when evaluating the make-span of the loading operation by YCs. Both the container bay visiting sequences and the number of containers picked up at each visit of the two YCs are determined simultaneously. A mathematical model, which considers interference between adjacent YCs, is provided by means of time-space network to formulate the problem and a two-stage hybrid algorithm composed of greedy algorithm and dynamic programming is developed to solve the proposed model. Numerical experiments were conducted to compare performances of the algorithm in this study with actual scheduling rules.
Highlights
As a hub for container transportation, container terminal is an important logistics node, linking container transportation by water and on land
There are three main types of equipment involved in the discharging and loading process, i.e., Quay Crane (QC), Yard Truck (YT) and Yard Crane (YC)
Since the outbound containers are usually scattered in the container blocks and the containers picked up by YCs need to satisfy the job sequences of the QCs, the loading process becomes crucial in determining the turnaround time
Summary
As a hub for container transportation, container terminal is an important logistics node, linking container transportation by water and on land. Several researches have addressed the YC scheduling problem It was first proposed by Chung et al (1988), Kim and Kim (1997, 1999) formulated a mixed integer programming model for the routing problem of a single-YC loading export containers out of the stack area onto waiting YTs. Han and Ding (2008) discussed problems of YCs allocation and optimization in loading/unloading process These recent researches generally solve multi-YCs scheduling problems under static conditions, which are all single-objective optimizations (either make-span or travel route), and rarely consider the work schedule of QCs, are not able to visualize scheduling details of YCs. In this paper, a time-space network is formulated to describe YCs travel route, and ‘where to retrieve containers’, ‘how many containers to be retrieved’, ‘which YC to retrieve’ are considered in the model.
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