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A Cooperative Approach to Dispatching and Scheduling Twin-Yard Cranes in Container Terminals

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Book cover Computational Logistics (ICCL 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9855))

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Abstract

To increase the productivity of the storage yard of a container terminal, two identical yard cranes are often deployed in a yard block. In theory, the productivity of a yard block may be doubled with twin-cranes. However, crane interference may severely lower the combined productivity of the twin-cranes. In this paper, we propose an online job dispatching method for twin yard cranes when side loading is used. The method adopts the non-zero-sum game approach to induce the cooperative behaviour in the dispatching and scheduling of jobs for the two cranes to minimize the total job completion time. A one-step lookahead algorithm and a two-step lookahead algorithm are proposed. We evaluate our algorithms against Ng’s lower bound of total completion time for twin-cranes and against the greedy heuristic Smallest Completion Time-First. Our experiments showed that our dispatching and scheduling algorithm performs very well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Shell Ying Huang & Ya Li

Authors
  1. Shell Ying Huang
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  2. Ya Li
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Correspondence to Shell Ying Huang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Paias

  2. University of Vienna , Vienna, Austria

    Mario Ruthmair

  3. University of Hamburg , Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Stefan Voß

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Huang, S.Y., Li, Y. (2016). A Cooperative Approach to Dispatching and Scheduling Twin-Yard Cranes in Container Terminals. In: Paias, A., Ruthmair, M., Voß, S. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9855. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44896-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44896-1_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44895-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-44896-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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