Efficiency considerations for sequencing and scheduling of double-rail-mounted gantry cranes at maritime container terminals

The current decade has seen a considerable growth in worldwide container transportation and with it, an indispensable need for optimisation. This paper seeks to investigate to which extent double-rail-mounted gantry cranes can help to improve a container terminal's efficiency. A simulation study is conducted for evaluating different online algorithms for sequencing and scheduling of jobs for automated double-rail-mounted gantry cranes serving a terminal's storage block. The experiments are based upon scenarios that are derived from the real world (Container Terminal Altenwerder, CTA, Hamburg, Germany) in order to investigate advantages as well as problems and limits of our algorithms and the specific crane systems. Furthermore, the influence of the horizontal transport at the block's interfaces is examined.