An Efficient Heuristic Algorithm for Solving Crane Scheduling Problem

This paper focuses on a single crane scheduling problem which is motivated by cooled-rolling material warehouse in the iron and steel enterprise. As storage technological requirement, coils have been stored on the pre-specified position in two levels. If a demanded coil is in the upper level, it can be picked up directly. If a demanded coil in the lower level is blocked by un-demanded coils, the coil can not be transported until all the blocking coils are shuffled to another position. Our problem combines transportation and shuffling simultaneously for crane to pick up all demanded coils as early as possible to designated place (makespan). We first propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. Some analytical properties are further provided. Based on these properties, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm. Numerical experiments are carried out to confirm our proposed methods can provide high quality solutions.