Yard Crane Scheduling in the Ground Trolley-Based Automated Container Terminal

The yard crane (YC) scheduling problem is studied for a new terminal design, known as the Ground Trolley-based Automated Container Terminal (GT-ACT). At the operational level, the YC scheduling problem considering GT could be formalized as job sequencing. The cooperative operation of the twin YCs, GT and the transport vehicles is complicated, a small change in the operation sequence may cause a chain reaction, which could overthrow the partial sequence preferred previously. A hybrid algorithm based on the nested partition (NP) framework is proposed. The ant colony (AC) algorithm is combined in the method for solution construction, while genetic algorithm (GA) is used for the perturbation and backtrack purposes. Experiments show the hybrid method is effective for practical problems under different scales. The AC and GA algorithms play an important role in improving the optimization.