Integrated Scheduling of Quay Cranes and Automated Lifting Vehicles in Automated Container Terminal with Unlimited Buffer Space

摘要

Nowadays, role of sea port container terminals in national and regional transportation and economy cannot be omitted. To respond enormous and every increasing demand on sea transshipments within the same time frame, terminal managers require more and more efficiency in container performance and operations. Automation of the processes at the quays of the container ports is one the solutions to improve the performance and output of container terminals. For such purpose, using new generation of vehicles is unavoidable. Automated Lifting Vehicle (ALV) is one of the automatic vehicles that has been introduced during recent years and can be used in container terminals. In this paper, an integrated scheduling of quay cranes and automated lifting vehicles with unlimited buffer space is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. Our objective is to minimize the makespan of all the loading and unloading tasks for a pre-defined set of cranes. Obtained result from our scheduling model is compared with an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) inspired from the same problem.