Dynamic yard crane dispatching in container terminals with predicted vehicle arrival information

The performance of a container terminal depends on many aspects of operations. This paper focuses on the optimal sequencing of a yard crane (or YC for short) for serving a fleet of vehicles for delivery and pickup jobs. The objective is to minimize the average vehicle waiting time. While heuristic algorithms could not guarantee an optimal solution, a conventional mathematical formulation such as mixed integer program would require too much computing time. We present two new algorithms to efficiently compute YC dispatching sequences that are provably optimal within the planning window. The first algorithm is based on the well-known A* search along with an admissible heuristics. We also incorporate this heuristics into a second backtracking algorithm which uses a prioritized search order to accelerate the computation. Experimental results show that both new algorithms perform very well for realistic YC jobs. Specifically, both are able to find within seconds optimal solutions for heavy workload scenarios with over 2.4 x 10(18) possible dispatching sequences. Moreover, even when the vehicle arrival times are not accurately forecasted, the new algorithms are still robust enough to produce optimal or near-optimal sequences, and they consistently outperform all the other algorithms evaluated. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.