Yard crane dispatching to minimize job tardiness in container terminals

Abstract

Singapore had been ranked as the top container port in the world since year 2005 but it was overtaken by Shanghai in year 2010. With the increasing number of global cargo flows and competition between countries, the container terminal operation in Singapore must be efficient enough to handle the increased workload and provide good services to customers. This project aims to help in reducing vessel turnaround time by looking at the YC dispatching problem which is to minimize vehicle job tardiness. It is to ensure that vehicles are able to leave yard blocks at the required times according to vehicle schedule so as to minimize the QCs waiting time for a vehicle. MTA* and MT-RBA* are proposed in this project in finding an optimal solution with dynamic computation of the YC job service times which helps reduce the future job service time in a dispatching sequence. Both algorithms are then evaluated against EDD and SCJF. From this project, it was found that MTA* and MT-RBA* have outperformed EDD and SCJF in finding the optimal job sequences and the computational time for MT-RBA* to find the optimal solution take only a few seconds.