The Simultaneous Quay Crane and Truck Scheduling Problem in Container Terminals

This paper addresses the simultaneous quay crane and truck scheduling problem (QC&TSP) at a container terminal. This paper considers one quay crane and several trucks to unload containers from the vessel, and every truck needs some time to come back to the quay crane after transports one container to the yard, then it can transport another container continually. In this paper, every container is arranged as a task to unload separately. Based on the features of the scheduling problem, an improved PSO (Particle Swarms Optimization) algorithm is presented to solve the scheduling problem, which develops a new formulation for updating velocity, besides, the decode method of the particles is designed in particular. Experiments are carried out especially to evaluate the performance of the proposed PSO algorithm, and compare with the solutions obtained by CPLEX software. The results show that the proposed PSO algorithm is efficient for solving the problem in the solution quality and computation time.