Integrated scheduling of handling equipment at automated container terminals

To improve the productivities of an automated container terminal, it is important to schedule different types of handling equipment in an integrated way. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the integrated operations between different types of handling equipment, is formulated. This study proposes a heuristic method, called multi-layer genetic algorithm (MLGA) to obtain the near-optimal solution of the integrated scheduling problem and an improved heuristic algorithm, called genetic algorithm plus maximum matching (GAPM), to reduce the computation complexity of the MLGA method. The performance of GAPM is also compared with that of the MLGA method. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.