Title: Integrated simulation and optimisation of scheduling yard crane and yard truck in loading operation

Authors: Pengliang Cao; Guiyan Jiang; Senjia Huang; Lingqi Ma

Addresses: Faculty of Maritime and Transportation, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China ' Faculty of Maritime and Transportation, National Traffic Management Engineering and Technology Research Centre Ningbo University Sub-Centre, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China; Jiangsu Province Collaborative Innovation Center of Modern Urban Traffic Technologies, Southeast University, Nanjing, China ' Faculty of Maritime and Transportation, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China ' Faculty of Maritime and Transportation, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China

Abstract: To further decrease turnaround time of container vessels, synchronous scheduling of yard crane (YC) and yard truck (YT) with the impact of quay crane (QC) is mainly considered. On this basis, the interference between YCs, YT pool strategy and other practical constraints, are also taken into consideration. Firstly, this problem formulated as a mixed integer programming model to minimise the makespan of loading operation. Due to the computational intractability, the multi-layers genetic algorithm is introduced to solve the problem with a simulation model, then an improved algorithm and an algorithm accelerating strategy are also designed to further improve the optimising efficiency. Finally, two sets of experiments with over 300 tests are conducted by eight elastic compute services on Alibaba Cloud to validate necessity of considering the impact of QC and the solution quality and effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Keywords: integrated scheduling; container terminal; simulation optimisation; multi-layers genetic algorithm; algorithm accelerating strategy; AAS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2020.107234

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2020 Vol.12 No.3, pp.230 - 250

Received: 11 Jan 2018
Accepted: 12 Feb 2019
Published online: 11 May 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article