Abstract
This paper proposes a tabu search heuristic for the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP), the problem of scheduling a fixed number of quay cranes in order to load and unload containers into and from a ship. The optimality criterion considered is the minimum completion time. Precedence and non-simultaneity constraints between tasks are taken into account. The former originate from the different kind of operations that each crane has to perform; the latter are needed in order to avoid interferences between the cranes. The QCSP is decomposed into a routing problem and a scheduling problem. The routing problem is solved by a tabu search heuristic, while a local search technique is used to generate the solution of the scheduling problem. This is done by minimizing the longest path length in a disjunctive graph. The effectiveness of our algorithm is assessed by comparing it to a branch-and-cut algorithm and to a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP).
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Sammarra, M., Cordeau, JF., Laporte, G. et al. A tabu search heuristic for the quay crane scheduling problem. J Sched 10, 327–336 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-007-0029-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-007-0029-5