A crane scheduling method for port container terminals

This paper discusses the problem of scheduling quay cranes (QCs), the most important equipment in port terminals. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the operation of QCs, was formulated. This study proposes a branch and bound (B & B) method to obtain the optimal solution of the QC scheduling problem and a heuristic search algorithm, called greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), to overcome the computational difficulty of the B & B method. The performance of GRASP is compared with that of the B & B method. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.