Crane scheduling in container yards with inter-crane interference

• Published in: European journal of operational research Vol. 164; no. 1; pp. 64 - 78
• Main Author: Ng, W.C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.07.2005; Elsevier; Elsevier Sequoia S.A
• Series: European Journal of Operational Research
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Container industry; Container terminal; Cranes & hoists; Exact sciences and technology; Flows in networks. Combinatorial problems; Heuristic; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Scheduling; Scheduling, sequencing; Studies; Transportation; Yard crane scheduling; Container terminal; Yard crane scheduling; Transportation; Heuristic; Interference; Benchmarking; Scheduling; Crane; Integer programming; Container; Heuristic method; Container transportation; NP complete problem; Competitive intelligence; Dynamic programming
• ISSN: 0377-2217; 1872-6860
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2003.11.025

This paper examines the problem of scheduling multiple yard cranes to perform a given set of jobs with different ready times in a yard zone with only one bi-directional travelling lane. Due to sharing of the travelling lane among two or more yard cranes, inter-crane interference, a planned move of a yard crane blocked by the other yard cranes, may happen. The scheduling problem is formulated as an integer program. It is noted that the scheduling problem is NP-complete. This research develops a dynamic programming-based heuristic to solve the scheduling problem and an algorithm to find lower bounds for benchmarking the schedules found by the heuristic. Computational experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the heuristic and the results show that the heuristic can indeed find effective solutions for the scheduling problem, with the heuristic solutions on average 7.3% above their lower bounds.