Quay crane scheduling problem with the consideration of maintenance

In a container terminal, maintenance activities commonly occur in the daily practices of quay crane scheduling, however, these maintenance activities have been ignored in the literature. This work investigates the quay crane scheduling problem with maintenance activities (QCSPM), an operational level problem at container ports. This paper first formulates a mathematical model to incorporate maintenance activities into the quay crane scheduling problem. Then the validity and reliability of our proposed mathematical model is testified by several small sizes random instances, and an efficient heuristic method is designed to solve such a complicated problem which existing commercial solvers can't handle. Moreover, a series of large-scale numerical experiments will be conducted to demonstrate and improve the performance of our solution method in the future.