Optimazition Of The Scheduling Problem For Container Handling System In Terminals

As one of the major method of transnational/regional transportation, container transport is playing a more and more important role in global transportation. While the container terminals are the key hubs of the container transport system, whose efficiency is mainly limited by the operations in container terminals. It is critical to improve the capability of container transport system and decrease the logistic cost by optimizing the operations on container terminals.To increase the efficiency of container terminals, the scheduling problem of quay cranes with dual cycling operations and the integrated scheduling problem of container handling system with single discharging/loading operations are studied at the beginning. The predefined discharging/loading constraints, sequence dependent setup time, quay crane interference constraints are proposed and studied. Based on these constraints, the integer programming models are built respectively. The modified genetic algorithm for quay crane scheduling and Johnson's law based heuristic algorithm are developed for these problems. By comparing with the lower bounds, the numerical experiments prove the algorithms effective and efficient, particular for problems with a large size.Based on the research for above two problems, the integrated scheduling problem of container handling system with dual cycling operations is discussed. The integer programming model is proposed and the property of the feasible solutions is analyzed on extended disjunctive graph. A neighborhood based on original partition is introduced for local search process, and finally a module based double layer tabu search algorithm is developed to solve the problem. In the experiments, the results show the container handling system can benefit dramatically by applying the dual cycling operations, comparing to the one that only single discharging/loading operations are applied.