Scheduling of Quay Crane at Container Terminals based on Ant Colony Algorithm

The most important performance measure to a shipping line in rating a terminal is the average quay crane rate, the quay cranes' throughput during a period. For the shipping line, this is a profit measure that should be maximized. In this paper, the improved ant colony optimization is introduced to optimizing the quay crane scheduling problem, attempted to minimize the total waiting time caused by quay cranes. It is proved that the ant colony optimization can perform well when applied to the quay crane scheduling problem.