Simultaneous load scheduling of quay crane and yard crane in port container terminals

Load scheduling problems of the quay crane (QC) and yard crane (YC) are important issues in port container terminal operations. Because the two scheduling problems are closely related, this paper proposes a mathematical model to formulate the load scheduling problem of the QC and YC simultaneously. A genetic algorithm (GA) and a heuristic method [QC and YC scheduling heuristic (QYSH)] are designed for the problem solution. Results obtained through numerical experiments showed that the problem-oriented QYSH method significantly outperformed the GA and could be applied in real operations to conduct simultaneous quay crane and yard crane scheduling.