An efficient algorithm for solving a new mathematical model for a quay crane scheduling problem in container ports

This paper presents a novel, mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for the quay crane (QC) scheduling and assignment problem, namely QCSAP, in a container port (terminal). Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. This paper, thus, proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the above-mentioned QCSAP for the real-world situations. Further, the efficiency of the proposed CA is compared against the LINGO software package in terms of computational times for small-sized problems. Our computational results suggest that the proposed CA is able to solve the QCSAP, especially for large sizes. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.