Scheduling of lifting vehicles with time windows in an automated port container terminal

A port container terminal is generally exploited with three types of equipments: Quay Cranes (QCs), vehicles and Yard Cranes (YCs). In this paper, we present a particular type of vehicles which is used at terminal of Normandy in Le Havre port in France. In this terminal, containers are transported from the marshalling yard to ship by the lifting vehicles (LV), capable of raising and of depositing a single container at various heights. This study discusses how to schedule LVs in loading or unloading operation by using information about pickup and delivery locations. Our goal is to organize the transfer of containers in order to minimize the total travel time of all LV, respecting the time window of every LV for a given number of containers. In order to solve this problem we propose a new modeling and a genetic algorithm adapted to the studied problem called “Genetic Algorithm for Loading or Unloading Operation GALUO”. We applied special types of crossover and mutation inspired from various data of our problem. GALUO is compared with a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) inspired from the same problem. Computational results on real instances show the good quality of the solutions obtained by the proposed method.