Gantry Crane Scheduling with Interference Constraints in Railway Container Terminals

Abstract Railway container terminals, where gantry cranes are responsible for loading and unloading containers between freight trains and yards, are important hubs of hinterland logistics transportation. Terminal managers confront the challenge in improving the efficiency of their service. As the most expensive equipment in a terminal, the operational performance of gantry cranes is a crucial factor. In this paper, the gantry crane scheduling problem of railway container terminals is investigated. A mixed integer programming model which considers the effect of dwelling position dependent processing times is formulated. In addition, the safety distances, the travel times and the non-crossing requirement of cranes are incorporated in the mathematical model. A novel discrete artificial bee colony algorithm is presented to solve the intractable scheduling problem. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm on some randomly constructed instances based on typical terminal operati...

[1]  Dervis Karaboga,et al.  AN IDEA BASED ON HONEY BEE SWARM FOR NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION , 2005 .

[2]  Dervis Karaboga,et al.  A comparative study of Artificial Bee Colony algorithm , 2009, Appl. Math. Comput..

[3]  Carlos F. Daganzo,et al.  A branch and bound solution method for the crane scheduling problem , 1990 .

[4]  Qun Niu,et al.  Particle swarm optimization combined with genetic operators for job shop scheduling problem with fuzzy processing time , 2008, Appl. Math. Comput..

[5]  Quan-Ke Pan,et al.  Pareto-based discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problems , 2011 .

[6]  K. L. Mak,et al.  Quay crane scheduling in container terminals , 2006 .

[7]  Nils Boysen,et al.  Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards , 2011, Transp. Sci..

[8]  Birger Raa,et al.  An enriched model for the integrated berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem , 2011, Expert Syst. Appl..

[9]  Thomas Stützle,et al.  A simple and effective iterated greedy algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[10]  Riccardo Poli,et al.  Particle swarm optimization , 1995, Swarm Intelligence.

[11]  M. F. Monaco,et al.  A tabu search heuristic for the quay crane scheduling problem , 2007 .

[12]  Kap Hwan Kim,et al.  Scheduling operations of a rail crane and container deliveries between rail and port terminals , 2011 .

[13]  Gilbert Laporte,et al.  A branch‐and‐cut algorithm for the quay crane scheduling problem in a container terminal , 2006 .

[14]  Youfang Huang,et al.  A quay crane dynamic scheduling problem by hybrid evolutionary algorithm for berth allocation planning , 2009, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[15]  Ali Husseinzadeh Kashan,et al.  A discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm for scheduling parallel machines , 2009, Computers & industrial engineering.

[16]  Carlos F. Daganzo,et al.  THE CRANE SCHEDULING PROBLEM , 1989 .

[17]  Der-Horng Lee,et al.  Integrated discrete berth allocation and quay crane scheduling in port container terminals , 2010 .

[18]  Yi Zhu,et al.  Crane scheduling with spatial constraints , 2004 .

[19]  Y. Zhu,et al.  Crane scheduling with non-crossing constraint , 2006, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[20]  Lixin Miao,et al.  Quay crane scheduling with non-interference constraints in port container terminals , 2008 .

[21]  Kap Hwan Kim,et al.  A scheduling method for Berth and Quay cranes , 2003 .

[22]  Der-Horng Lee,et al.  An approximation algorithm for quay crane scheduling with handling priority in port container terminals , 2010 .

[23]  Ivona Brajevic,et al.  Artificial bee colony algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem , 2011 .

[24]  Leyuan Shi,et al.  The allocation of berths and quay cranes by using a sub-gradient optimization technique , 2010, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[25]  Christian Bierwirth,et al.  Heuristics for the integration of crane productivity in the berth allocation problem , 2009 .

[26]  Erhan Kozan,et al.  Optimising container transfers at multimodal terminals , 2000 .

[27]  Kap Hwan Kim,et al.  A scheduling method for Berth and Quay cranes , 2003, OR Spectr..

[28]  Christian Bierwirth,et al.  A survey of berth allocation and quay crane scheduling problems in container terminals , 2010, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[29]  Mehmet Fatih Tasgetiren,et al.  A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the total flowtime minimization in permutation flow shops , 2011, Inf. Sci..

[30]  Andrew Lim,et al.  A m‐parallel crane scheduling problem with a non‐crossing constraint , 2007 .

[31]  Manfred Gronalt,et al.  Generic simulation for rail-road container terminals , 2008, 2008 Winter Simulation Conference.

[32]  Christian Bierwirth,et al.  A fast heuristic for quay crane scheduling with interference constraints , 2009, J. Sched..

[33]  Dervis Karaboga,et al.  A powerful and efficient algorithm for numerical function optimization: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm , 2007, J. Glob. Optim..

[34]  Kap Hwan Kim,et al.  A crane scheduling method for port container terminals , 2004, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[35]  D. Karaboga,et al.  On the performance of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm , 2008, Appl. Soft Comput..

[36]  Pasquale Legato,et al.  Modeling and solving rich quay crane scheduling problems , 2012, Comput. Oper. Res..

[37]  Peng Guo,et al.  Simulation on Operation Influence by External Factors for Railway Container Logistics Center , 2010 .

[38]  Erhan Kozan,et al.  An assignment model for dynamic load planning of intermodal trains , 2006, Comput. Oper. Res..

[39]  Mehmet Fatih Tasgetiren,et al.  A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the lot-streaming flow shop scheduling problem , 2011, Inf. Sci..

[40]  Lixin Miao,et al.  Quay crane scheduling with handling priority in port container terminals , 2008 .