Decreasing the Crane Working Time in Retrieving the Containers from a Bay

Given the initial layout of a container terminal with a bay, the container retrieval problem aims at obtaining a movement sequence for the crane to retrieve all the containers arranged in a pre-defined order. In this study, we develop a computationally efficient heuristic, called constant summation (CSUM), to minimize the total crane's working time required to retrieve all the containers from a given bay. Numerical results show that CSUM is very promising in dealing with the container retrieval problems and outperforms the best known approaches recently presented in the literature in terms of the crane's working time.