Scheduling of collaborative operations of yard cranes and yard trucks for export containers using hybrid approaches

Optimizing collaborative operations for yard cranes (YCs) and yard trucks (YTs) is vital to the overall performance of a container terminal. This research investigates four different hybrid approaches developed for dealing with yard crane scheduling problem (YCSP) and yard truck scheduling problem (YTSP) simultaneously for export containers in the yard side area of a container terminal. First, these approaches use a load-balancing heuristic to assign containers to YCs evenly. Following this, each of them employs a specific heuristic/metaheuristic, such as genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) or subgroups PSO (SGPSO), to generate alternative container loading sequences for each YC. Finally, a simulation model is used to simulate loading and transporting of these export containers, evaluate alternative planning results, and finally output the best planning result. Experiments have been conducted to compare these hybrid approaches. The results show Hybrid4 (SGPSO) outperforms Hybrid1 (Sort-by-bay), Hybrid2 (GA), and Hybrid3 (PSO) in terms of makespan.