A generalized classification scheme for crane scheduling with interference

Nowadays, many industries rely on cranes for efficiently executing storage and retrieval operations of goods. Areas of application are, for instance, container logistics in seaports and warehousing operations in automated storage and retrieval systems. Therefore, it is not astounding that plenty scientific papers on crane scheduling in many different yet closely related logistics settings have accumulated. In many of these problems, crane interference occurs. A prominent example is non-crossing constraints where cranes share a common pathway and cannot overtake each other. In order to structure this vast field of research, this paper provides a classification scheme for crane scheduling problems with crane interference. We apply this scheme to classify the existing literature, to determine the status-quo of complexity results, and to identify future research needs. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.