Integrated scheduling of handling equipment at automated container terminals

To improve the productivities of an automated container terminal, it is important to schedule different types of handling equipment in an integrated way. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the integrated operations between different types of handling equipment, is formulated. A heuristic algorithm, called multi-layer genetic algorithm is developed with a view to overcome the computation difficulty for solving the mathematical model. A numerical experimentation is carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.