Quay Crane Assignment Optimization with Time Window at Container Terminals

摘要

In this paper, we study the Quay Crane (QC) assignment for incoming vessels by introducing hard time windows into the container terminal. Given a nonlinear programming model, a set of 0-1 variables is employed to describe the starting position of the operation for each QC in a certain vessel. We also employ another set of 0-1 variables to locate the ending operation position for each QC in the same vessel. The research objective is to minimize the maximum operation time of each QC. This is a typical NP-hard problem, so a genetic algorithm is applied to the searching of the optimum solution in real-time applications. We carried out a series of experiments in order to evaluate our model. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm can significantly raise the operating efficiency of the container terminal.