A quay crane scheduling algorithm considering the workload of yard cranes in a container yard

Quay cranes (QCs) are the most important equipment for vessel operation in container terminals. It is important to efficiently schedule the operations of QCs so that a high productivity may be achieved in terminals. Because the storage yard is shared by multiple vessels, where the congestion of yard cranes and yard trucks must be considered, the operations of QCs for multiple vessels must be simultaneously considered for QC scheduling. The objective terms include the QC make-span, the total traveling distance of QCs, the expected delay time from interference, and the uniformity of workload among blocks. This study suggests a heuristic algorithm based on a meta-heuristic search algorithm. Finally, a numerical experiment is carried out to test the performance of the algorithm.