Article ID: | iaor20127071 |
Volume: | 225 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 142 |
End Page Number: | 152 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2013 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Langevin Andr, Lu Zhiqiang, Chen Lu |
Keywords: | heuristics, graphs |
This paper studies the interactions between crane handling and truck transportation in a maritime container terminal by addressing them simultaneously. Yard trucks are shared among different ships, which helps to reduce empty truck trips in the terminal area. The problem is formulated as a constraint programming model and a three‐stage algorithm is developed. At the first stage, crane schedules are generated by a heuristic method. At the second stage, the multiple‐truck routing problem is solved based on the precedence relations of the transportation tasks derived from the first stage. At the last stage a complete solution is constructed by using a disjunctive graph. The three procedures are linked by an iterative structure, which facilitates the search for a good solution. The computational results indicate that the three‐stage algorithm is effective for finding high‐quality solutions and can efficiently solve large problems.