Gantry crane scheduling in intermodal rail-road container terminals

Abstract

Modern rail-road container terminals serve as important consolidation nodes in intermodal transportation networks where containers are transferred between freight trains and trucks. Among the most important decision problems in these yards is the crane scheduling problem, which decides on the sequences of container moves executed by each of the parallel gantry cranes. This paper treats a rich crane scheduling problem, which considers plenty relevant constraints and is directly applicable in Chinese intermodal terminals. For solving this problem, we propose a fix-and-optimise procedure, which is easy to implement and shown to successfully solve even large-sized instances with 100 container moves in reasonable time.

Keywords:

• intermodal container terminals
• gantry cranes
• scheduling
• mixed integer linear programming
• fix-and-optimise

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51405403]; China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project [grant number 2015M582566].