Study On Optimization Model And Algorithm Of Yard Cranes Scheduling In A Container Terminal

Container transportation, as an advanced transportation model, has been widely used both at home and in abroad. Container terminal yard, as a key node for container transportation, with the continuous development of container shipping, is facing with the increasing pressure. Port resources, information technology, the management mode, and other factors can affect the level of the operation of container terminal. With the container terminal yard existing scale and allocation of resources, how to improve the operational efficiency of the whole terminal is an extremely important problem. This paper studies the routing optimization problem of yard cranes, expect to improve the efficiency of yard cranes and shorten it’s operation time, to achieve the Container terminal’s effective resource usage.In this paper, by the linear programming, the dynamic programming and some other optimization theory and method in operational research, we study the optimization of yard cranes’routes. We establish a two-stage programming model, the first stage is to determine the bay number and the quantity of suitcase on each bay to fulfill the whole task, and we divide the second stage into a single and more than one yard cranes types, it’s objective is to minimum the total moving distance, to determine the bay number sequence for yard cranes to work, then combined with the size of suitcase which was determined in the first stage, we get the bay number sequence and quantity of suitcase on the corresponding bay to finish all the task of each yard crane. To solve this mathematic model we design a algorithm combined the linear programming with the dynamic programming, first we make the problem being linear and continuous for the first stage, then we use the simplex method to get the least quantity of bay which yard cranes need to work, for the second stage, we adopt the dynamic programming method to select a bay for the yard crane to work with the minimum distance, finally we can get the bay number sequence for each yard crane to work, and we compromise our two stage model with the mixed integer programming model, also we make a comparison analysis with our two phrase algorithm, the simulated annealing algorithm, the genetic algorithm and the greed stochastic search algorithm, by multiple examples we validate the effectiveness of our model and algorithm, which can show the rationality of the mathematical model, the high efficiency of the algorithm. Then the working efficiency of container terminal can be effective improved and the operation time can be reduced.