INTEGRATED SCHEDULING OF SP-AS/RS AND HANDLING EQUIPMENT IN AUTOMATED CONTAINER TERMINALS

Conventionally, the containers are stacked in storage yards inside the container terminals. However, in recent years a new storage system called split-platform automated storage/ retrieval system (SP-AS/RS) has been introduced in the literature. On the other hand, integrated scheduling of handling equipment has been introduced as an essential concept to improve the performance of the automated container terminals. Improving the performance of container terminals would result in reduction of seaborne trade costs. In this paper a mixed integer programming model is formulated for the integrated scheduling of handling equipment (including the SP-AS/RS) in automated container terminals. In the formulation of the problem, tasks of cranes are scheduled considering the availability of the vehicles. Moreover, the vehicles are scheduled in accordance with the SP-AS/RS operations. The integrated scheduling has been proved as an NP-hard problem. Thus, a simulated annealing algorithm is developed to find near optimal solutions for the problem in relatively low computational time. Using a set of numerical test cases it is justified that the proposed simulated annealing algorithm is suitable to solve the problem. Further analyses on the number of available vehicles are the final notes of this paper.

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