Title
Modeling and solving rich quay crane scheduling problems
Abstract
The quay crane scheduling problem is a core task of managing maritime container terminals. In this planning problem, discharge and load operations of containers of a ship are scheduled on a set of deployed quay cranes. In this paper, we provide a rich model for quay crane scheduling that covers important issues of practical relevance like crane-individual service rates, ready times and due dates for cranes, safety requirements, and precedence relations among container groups. Focus is put on the incorporation of so-called unidirectional schedules into the model, by which cranes move along the same direction, either from bow to stern or from stern to bow, when serving the vessel. For solving the problem, we employ a branch-and-bound scheme that is known to be the best available solution method for a class of less rich quay crane scheduling problems. This scheme is extended by revising and extending the contained lower bounds and branching criteria. Moreover, a novel Timed Petri Net approach is developed and incorporated into the scheme for determining the starting times of the discharge and load operations in a schedule. Numerical experiments are carried out on both, sets of benchmark instances taken from the literature and real instances from the port of Gioia Tauro, Italy. The experiments confirm that the new method provides high quality solutions within short runtimes. It delivers new best solutions for some of the benchmark problems from the literature. It also shows capable of coping with rich real world problem instances where it outperforms the planning approach applied by practitioners.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.cor.2011.09.025
Computers & OR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
branch-and-bound scheme,rich real world problem,quay crane scheduling,quay crane,quay crane scheduling problem,planning problem,benchmark problem,rich model,rich quay crane scheduling,load operation
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0305-0548
33
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.29
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pasquale Legato128220.44
Roberto Trunfio2795.17
Frank Meisel337420.67