Optimization of Gantry Crane Scheduling in Container Sea-Rail Intermodal Transport Yard

Abstract

In the face of rising container throughput and the tasks associated with collecting and dispatching these containers, contributions to the development of sea-rail intermodal transport are required to improve the capacity of container transportation. According to the characteristics and the requirements of the operation of sea-rail intermodal transport, this paper puts forward a design for the transport yard which facilitates container loading and unloading. Through the establishment of a mixed integer programming model, a flexible schedule for gantry crane operation can be realized, so that, during the planned period, the amount of task overflow in loading and unloading operations and the distance covered by all gantry cranes in the yard is minimized. In addition, a genetic algorithm is designed to solve this model. Finally, a specific example of the loading and unloading of a container train at the sea-rail intermodal transport yard is selected to verify the model and the algorithm. The results show that the algorithm can reasonably schedule the gantry cranes to improve their loading and unloading efficiencies in the sea-rail intermodal transport yard.

A survey on computational intelligence approaches for intelligent marine terminal operations

“…The major operations in the marshalling yard include vehicle routing [23], transport vehicle dispatching [24], yard cranes scheduling and yard truck scheduling [25,26], yard cranes and yard truck utilization [27,28], storage blocks allocation [29], yard transshipment problem, also known as yard allocation problem [30], and traffic control [16]. Typically, all containers are stored at the MCT for a particular time period before delivering them to trucks or trains for inland transportation or loading them to vessels for water transportation.…”

“…The major operations in the marshalling yard include vehicle routing [23], transport vehicle dispatching [24], yard cranes scheduling and yard truck scheduling [25, 26], yard cranes and yard truck utilization [27, 28], storage blocks allocation [29], yard transshipment problem, also known as yard allocation problem [30], and traffic control [16].…”

A decision method on yard cranes transformation and deployment in green ports

“…Luo et al. (2018) proposed a YCs scheduling model intending to minimize the amount of task overflow and the YC transfer distance within planned time, and then a genetic algorithm (GA) was designed to solve the problem. Kumar and Omkar (2008) proposed a YCs scheduling optimization model and applied GA and PSO to minimize the task waiting time and handling time.…”

“…To solve the multi-objective YC scheduling problem with multiple work lines, Liang et al (2014) constructed a multi-objective 0-1 integer programming model, intending to minimize the total finish time of the YCs and maximize the balanced distribution of the finish time. Luo et al (2018) proposed a YCs scheduling model intending to minimize the amount of task overflow and the YC transfer distance within planned time, and then a genetic algorithm (GA) was designed to solve the problem. Kumar and Omkar (2008) proposed a YCs scheduling optimization model and applied GA and PSO to minimize the task waiting time and handling time.…”

A comprehensive review of quay crane scheduling, yard operations and integrations thereof in container terminals

“…The number of publications focusing on minimizing task completion time is also similar (a total of 14 papers). The articles that considered scheduling generally concentrated on task completion times as an objective function (Kouismi 2017;Luo et al 2018). Studies on storage space assignment problems commonly considered the optimization of storage space utilization, which is represented by 12 of the publications (Jiang et al 2013a;Li et al 2017;Mengjue et al 2016;Voss et al 2017).…”