Scheduling operations of a rail crane and container deliveries between rail and port terminals

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of scheduling container transfer operations in rail terminals. The overall problem can be divided into three smaller problems: constructing a dual-cycle delivery task by matching inbound and outbound containers; determining parking positions for trucks; and sequencing the delivery tasks for transfer by the rail crane. This article provides a mathematical model to obtain the optimal solutions to these problems, and suggests genetic and heuristic algorithms to reduce computational time when solving larger problems. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the suggested heuristic algorithms.