Real Time Scheduling for Multiple Yard Cranes in an Automated Container Terminal

Park, Tae-lin; Choe, Ri; Ryu, Kwang-Ryel

Journal of Navigation and Port Research 2007;31(10):869-877.
Published online December 30, 2007.

자동화 컨테이너 터미널의 복수 장치장 크레인을 위한 실시간 작업 계획 수립

박태진, 최이, 류광렬

Real Time Scheduling for Multiple Yard Cranes in an Automated Container Terminal

Tae-lin Park, Ri Choe, Kwang-Ryel Ryu

Abstract

This paper proposes a realtime scheduling method using local search algorithm for non-crossable yard cranes in automated container terminal. To take into consideration the dynamic property of yard crane operation and satisfy the real time constraint, the proposed method repeatedly builds crane schedule for the jobs in a fixed length look-ahead horizon whenever a new job is requested In addition, the proposed method enables the co-operation between yard cranes through prior re-handling and re-positioning in order to resolve the workload imbalance problem between the two cranes, which is one of the primary causes that lower the performance of yard cranes. Simulation-based experiments have shown that the proposed method outperforms the heuristic based methods, and the cooperation scheme contributes a lot to the performance improvement.

Key Words: Automated container terminal;Yard crane;Real-time scheduling;Optimization;Local search algorithm