Smallest job completion time heuristics for yard crane dispatching in container terminals

Abstract

In land-constrained port container terminals, yard cranes are commonly used for handling containers

in a container yard to load containers onto or unload containers from trucks. However, yard cranes

are bulky, slow and need to move frequently between their work locations. As it is common that

the container flow in a terminal is bottlenecked by yard crane operations, effective work schedules

of yard cranes are needed to increase the terminal’s throughput. This article studies the problem of

scheduling a yard crane to perform a given set of container handling jobs with different ready times.

The objective is to minimize the sum of job waiting times. It is noted that the scheduling problem is

NP-complete. This research develops a heuristic to solve the scheduling problem and an algorithm

to find lower bounds for benchmarking the schedules found by the heuristic. The performance of the

heuristic is evaluated by a set of test problems generated on the basis of real-life terminal operations

data. Indeed, the computational results show that the proposed heuristic can find effective solutions

for the scheduling problem.