An efficient algorithm for solving a new mathematical model for a quay crane scheduling problem in container ports

This paper presents a novel, mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for the quay crane (QC) scheduling and assignment problem, namely QCSAP, in a container port (terminal). Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. This paper, thus, proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the above-mentioned QCSAP for the real-world situations. Further, the efficiency of the proposed GA is compared against the LINGO software package in terms of computational times for smallsized problems. Our computational results suggest that the proposed GA is able to solve the QCSAP, especially for large sizes. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.