Tabu Search Heuristics for the Crane Sequencing Problem

Determining the sequence of relocating items (or resources) moved by a crane from existing positions to newly assigned locations during a multi‐period planning horizon is a complex combinatorial optimisation problem, which exists in power plants, shipyards, and warehouses. Therefore, it is essential to develop a good crane route technique to ensure efficient utilisation of the crane as well as to minimise the cost of operating the crane. This problem was defined as the Crane Sequencing Problem (CSP). In this paper, three construction and three improvement algorithms are presented for the CSP. The first improvement heuristic is a simple Tabu Search (TS) heuristic. The second is a probabilistic TS heuristic, and the third adds diversification and intensification strategies to the first. The computational experiments show that the proposed TS heuristics produce high‐quality solutions in reasonable computation time.