Examination of the effectiveness and robustness of the heuristics for bay-based quay crane scheduling problem in port container terminals

The decision of quay crane scheduling problem is crucial for port operators in port container terminals. In this paper, bay-based quay crane scheduling problem is studied and three heuristics designed for the studied problem are identified and their performances (measured both effectiveness and robustness) are examined through a numerical experiment. Herein, the robustness of the solving heuristics is defined as the quality of the methods, as measure by how well the solutions constructed by the methods can offset the adverse impact generated by the randomness of the input. Compared with previous studies in this field, the proposed benchmarking criteria (in terms of both effectiveness and robustness) to evaluate the performance of the heuristics is unique and practical.