Integrated scheduling of handling operations in railway container terminals

Abstract

The railway handling area of the railway container terminal is the main place for container sea–rail transportation. To enhance the efficiency of the handling systems and improve the coordination of different types of equipment in railway handling area, an integrated scheduling model is developed, which integrates the scheduling of rail-mounted gantry cranes (GCs), inner trucks (ITs), and yard cranes (YCs). This model considers not only train loading and unloading simultaneously, but GC interference and safety margin, GC and YC travel time as well as buffer area. A multi-layer genetic algorithm (MLGA) is proposed to solve the problem. Eventually, comparison experiments are conducted, including the experiments on handling process between non-optimization and optimization, MLGA with and without the balanced operator and the performance of different numbers of ITs. These experiments validate that the model and algorithm is feasible and efficient in both equipment scheduling and allocation problem.

Keywords:

• Integrated transportation
• integrated scheduling
• multi-layer genetic algorithm
• handling operation
• railway handling area

Acknowledgments

Our deepest gratitude goes to both the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their careful work and thoughtful suggestions that have helped improve this paper substantially.