Cranes control with time-based and position constraints

In this paper, we consider a class of cranes scheduling problem; cranes serve locations moving along a track and they can not over cross. By exploiting Petri nets formalism we obtain a model for crane movements and crane position constraints. We then consider task time-based constraints and formulate the general scheduling problem when the control target is to minimize a given objective function. Computational experiments show that the proposed scheduler leads to optimal solutions in a very short time compared with an exhaustive search algorithm.