The simultaneous reshuffle and yard crane scheduling problem in container terminals

This paper studies the simultaneous reshuffle and yard crane scheduling problem in the yard of container terminals, which is one of the key logistics problems affecting the operation efficiency in container terminals. Although the reshuffle scheduling problem has received many research attention due to its importance, the problem without considering yard crane is not very practical, which is because the shuffle process needs yard crane to carry out, and the improper yard crane scheduling will weaken the optimized shuffle planning, therefore the reshuffle and yard crane scheduling should be considered simultaneously. The problem in this paper is to choose appropriate objective locations for the reshuffled containers and obtain the picking up sequence for all the containers on the yard crane, with the objective to reduce the sum of the total completion time for all the containers and the reshuffling time for all the reshuffled containers. A mixed integer model is proposed for the problem. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to obtain near optimal solutions of the problem. The experiment results show that the solutions of the simultaneous scheduling problem are better than the results obtained by solving the reshuffle scheduling problem and the yard crane scheduling problem, respectively.