Article ID: | iaor20072867 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 53 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 60 |
End Page Number: | 74 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2006 |
Journal: | Naval Research Logistics |
Authors: | Liu Jiyin, Wan Yat-wah, Wang Lei |
Keywords: | transportation: water, combinatorial analysis, heuristics, programming: integer |
In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling quay cranes at container terminals where incoming vessels have different ready times. The objective is to minimize the maximum relative tardiness of vessel departures. The problem can be formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model of large size that is difficult to solve directly. We propose a heuristic decomposition approach to break down the problem into two smaller, linked models, the vessel-level and the berth-level models. With the same berth-level model, two heuristic methods are developed using different vessel-level models. Computational experiments show that the proposed approach is effective and efficient.