An improved Least Cost Heuristic for dynamic yard crane deployment in container terminals

Yard Crane (YC) deployment in a multi-berth terminal is a very complex problem. The total amount of work to the entire terminal yard changes dynamically over time. The levels of workload to different parts of the yard also vary greatly and change over time. So the YC deployment algorithm plays a critical role in increasing YC productivity and reducing vehicle waiting times in the yard. This paper proposes two improved Least Cost Heuristic (LCH) algorithms. The two algorithms consider practical operation constraints and improve performance by adding weight to long waiting jobs and judicious use of YC idle time within deployment periods. We evaluate the improved algorithms against the original LCH [8] in a storage yard of practical size, under dynamically changing workload both in time and space. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms make substantial reductions in job waiting times over the original algorithm.