Author(s)

Xuehan Sui, Wen Sheng, Jiaying Hu and Qianqian Shao

Corresponding Author

Qianqian Shao

ABSTRACT

There is no strict time limit for truck arrivals in the process of terminal consolidation. The uncertain truck arrival time directly affects the container stockpiling structure which is essential to the pick-up efficiency of yard crane in ship loading operations. Many unnecessary time-coasting actions such as reshuffling and frequent movement of yard crane caused by unreasonable stowage structure would lower terminal productivity. Generalized container delivery sequence with delivery time uncertainty is described by using Markov Chain (MC) and then an estimating delivery sequence would be achieved. Based on that, a two-stage mathematic model for stockpiling and yard crane scheduling optimization is formulated with the promise of minimizing pre-reshuffling and crane movement distance. As a methodology, heuristics solving the initial scheduling is developed to obtain a static pre-optimized plan. To conquer the deviation of predicted delivery sequence, a dynamic algorithm is proposed in optimizing the real-time scheduling. Several sets of experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model and algorithm.

KEYWORDS

Container; yard crane scheduling; reshuffling; generalized delivery sequence; Markov Chain