The Scheduling of Multiple Yard Cranes in a Container Block by a Look-Ahead Heuristic

• Main Authors: Chen-Hung Chen, 陳竑成
• Other Authors: Yat-Wah Wan
• Format: Others
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/92631519766073503871

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 運籌管理研究所 === 101 === Ocean transportation has tremendous growth. The throughput of each port increases, and the competition of among ports become fierce. In order to attract customers, ports enhance the efficiency of container processing. Yard cranes are the most important factor for the efficiency of container processing, and it is the most important equipment in the yard zone. In other words, a good yard crane scheduling can increase the efficiency of container processing. Because yard cranes cannot cross each other, our thesis investigates avoiding the interference of yard cranes, and then we can enhance the efficiency of container processing. Our method first follows the heuristic of Ng (2005). We partition the block into different parts. Each part is assigned a yard crane to handle containers. For each yard crane, we use the greedy heuristic to find the best scheduling of container processing. Then we use dynamic program to compare different situations and choose the best one which minimizes the total completion time. Then we use the look-ahead heuristic and the modified look-ahead heuristic to replace the greedy heuristic from Ng (2005) to deduce whether the result is better or not. All the computation is carried out by Java programs.