Optimization research of joint quay crane scheduling and block selection in container terminals

This paper addresses the joint quay crane and yard selection problem at a container terminal. We consider the work capacity of the quay cranes and the storage capacity of yard blocks. For the bidirectional flow problem with both inbound and outbound containers, a mixed-integer linear programming model under determination is formulated to minimize the make-span and the traveling time of truck by using discretization policy. An improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is suggested to solve this problem, in which a neighborhood taboo search and a heuristic pre-processing are incorporated to improve the solution quality and runtime. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed models and the efficiency of the proposed solution algorithm.