Quay crane scheduling at container terminals to minimize the maximum relative tardiness of vessel departures

In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling quay cranes (QCs) at container terminals where incoming vessels have different ready times. The objective is to minimize the maximum relative tardiness of vessel departures. The problem can be formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model of large size that is difficult to solve directly. We propose a heuristic decomposition approach to breakdown the problem into two smaller, linked models, the vessel-level and the berth-level models. With the same berth-level model, two heuristic methods are developed using different vessel-level models. Computational experiments show that the proposed approach is effective and efficient. (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.