MILP Model and a Rolling Horizon Algorithm for Crane Scheduling in a Hybrid Storage Container Terminal

What is it about?

This paper investigates the yard crane scheduling problem of a hybrid storage container terminal whose import containers and export containers are stored together in each block. The combination of containers improves the space utilization of a container terminal while it also creates new challenges for the yard crane scheduling. To formulate this problem, we propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, which jointly optimizes trucks' waiting costs and penalty costs caused by exceeding waiting time thresholds. Considering the NP-completeness of this scheduling problem, we develop an efficient rolling horizon algorithm based on some heuristics to reduce the computation time. Finally, computational studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of our method and the solutions obtained by CPLEX solver are used for benchmarking purposes.

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