A mathematical formulation for integrated scheduling problem of handling equipment in container terminals

This paper studies an integrated scheduling problem of quay cranes, yard trucks and yard cranes in container terminals. As each container is sequentially handled by these three interrelated handling equipment, the global optimal solution may not be guaranteed by only considering one type of equipment separately. The proposed problem considers the interdependency of different handling equipment to improve the overall performance of container terminals. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming is proposed to search the optimal solution for this integrated problem. The results of computational experiments show that the integrated scheduling problem in small size could be efficiently solved by using the mathematical model.