Author(s)

Xuehan Sui, Hengxing Tong, Jiaying Hu and Qianqian Shao

Corresponding Author

Qianqian Shao

ABSTRACT

The truck appointment system has been widely applied in the terminal consolidation and configuration process. The “appointment-to-scheduling” mode of the traditional appointment mechanism causes the one-way transmission (from trucker to terminal information platform) of scheduling information. Based on this situation, this paper presented a new mechanism of truck appointment-the co-appointment, which integrated the truck appointment process and the dynamic deployment of yard crane. In co-appointment, information of yard crane deployment and terminal busy level will be fed back to the truck drivers to support their decision making. A bi-level hybrid genetic algorithm was developed to optimize yard crane deployment. Comparing with traditional appointment mechanism and quota-based appointment mechanism, the experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of co-appointment on flattening the peak working and decreasing the turnover time of trucks.

KEYWORDS

Container terminal; yard crane deployment;Truck appointment; cooperative optimization; bi-level genetic algorithm