A quay crane scheduling problem: a heuristic approach

In a modern container port, an efficient crane operation plays an important role for a container terminal because it dominates the terminal operation performance, such as utilization of vessel berthing in the terminal. In this paper, a mathematical model is established to describe quay scheduling problem. The model can consider the traveling time factor or ignore that factor, which is different from other researchers' model. Besides, a simple heuristic approach is proposed to solve this problem. No matter the crane traveling time is included or excluded; the worst case bound is proved no more than 2, which indicates the heuristic can solve the problem effectively and efficiently.