Quay crane scheduling with non-interference constraints in port container terminals

Abstract

The quay crane scheduling problem studied in this paper is to determine a handling sequence of holds for quay cranes assigned to a container vessel considering interference between quay cranes. This paper provides a mixed integer programming model for the considered quay crane scheduling problem that is NP-complete in nature. A genetic algorithm is proposed to obtain near optimal solutions. Computational experiments are conducted to examine the proposed model and solution algorithm. The computational results show that the proposed genetic algorithm is effective and efficient in solving the considered quay crane scheduling problem. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.