Two Yard Crane Scheduling With Dynamic Processing Time and Interference

Abstract

Maritime transportation is an important branch of intelligent transportation system (ITS). It is widely recognized that modern ITS technologies and advanced management methods, such as automated yard crane (YC) planning and scheduling, can significantly improve container terminal performance, and also impact the global performance of maritime transportation. In this paper, we investigate two YC scheduling with storage and retrieval tasks in a container block. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) container reshuffling operations and inter-crane interference constraint are both considered and 2) the dynamic processing times for retrieval containers are taken into consideration. These typical YC operation characteristics complicate the YC scheduling, and cause late delivery and economic loss. In this study, we focus on minimizing the maximum tardiness of container task and establishing an integer linear programming model. Regarding the NP-hardness nature of the problem, we develop a heuristic named dividing, sequencing, and comparing (DSC) and a genetic algorithm (GA) based on the characteristics of the problem. The computational results show the efficient performance of the developed algorithms, compared with the exact solutions via Cplex software for small size instances. The efficiency and effectiveness of DSC outperform those of GA for practical size instances.