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Scheduling crossover cranes at container terminals during seaside peak times

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Abstract

This paper deals with crane scheduling in a block of a container terminal equipped with two crossover cranes. We concentrate on the situation when all requests in this block refer to the seaside. This seaside peak time occurs when a container ship is berthed and has to be served as quickly as possible because berthing time is a major cost driver for both, the shipping company and the port operator. In this case, the two cranes highly interfere. We formulate this problem as a MIP, prove its \(\mathcal {NP}\)-hardness and introduce a lower bound. Further, we provide several heuristic solution procedures based on priority rules. A comparison of all procedures concludes this paper and gives insights on how to solve this problem in practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sustainable Operations and Logistics, University of Augsburg, Universitaetsstr. 16, 86159, Augsburg, Germany

    Anne Ehleiter

  2. Management Science and Operations Research, Helmut-Schmidt-University - University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Holstenhofweg 85, 22043, Hamburg, Germany

    Florian Jaehn

Authors
  1. Anne Ehleiter
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  2. Florian Jaehn
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Correspondence to Florian Jaehn.

Additional information

This work has been supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) through the grant “Scheduling mechanisms for rail mounted gantries with respect to crane interdependencies” (JA 2311/2-1).

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Ehleiter, A., Jaehn, F. Scheduling crossover cranes at container terminals during seaside peak times. J Heuristics 24, 899–932 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-018-9380-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-018-9380-2

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