Solving the Twin Yard Crane Scheduling Problem in Automated Container Terminals

Abstract

This study focuses on scheduling twin Automated Stacking Cranes (ASCs) that collaborate to serve storage and retrieval jobs from opposite ends of a block. Since the ASCs cannot cross each other, there is a handshake bay that serves as a temporary storage location so that one crane can leave a job for the other to complete. A proposed mixed integer programming model that aims to minimize the time required to finish all jobs is formulated and solved. Four modes of crane interference that may occur at the handshake bay are taken into consideration. This paper is the first to investigate the effect of different handshake bay locations on the objective value when a task is split into jobs, and results show that the handshake bay location has no effect on the objective value if the task is split into jobs of equal number of size.