Iterated greedy for the yard crane scheduling problem with input/output assignment

Hongtao Wang, Rubén Ruiz, Fulgencia Villa and Eva Vallada

European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 327, issue 1, 84-94

Abstract: The yard crane scheduling problem (YCSP) consists of optimizing container loading for storage and retrieval requests from yard cranes at port terminals. This paper studies a realistic generalization of the YCSP that incorporates the assignments of input/output (I/O) points during the optimization stage. I/O points serve as buffers between the different transportation modes in the port terminal. These are limited in number and unproductive idle times might result if a container schedule exhausts I/O point availability. The resulting problem entails not only scheduling container storage and retrieval requests, but also the assignment of the I/O points. We introduce a series of simple, yet powerful, Iterated Greedy (IG) methods. These include variations of the destruction and reconstruction operators, coordination with novel local search procedures and problem-specific knowledge speed-ups. The proposed IG methods are carefully calibrated and evaluated using comprehensive computational experiments. The results indicate that small changes in the features of the algorithm have a profound impact on performance. Comparisons against the state-of-the-art approaches for this particular problem result in a strong, and statistically significant performance advantage for the proposed IG procedures.

Keywords: Iterated Greedy; Yard crane scheduling problem; Heuristics; Input/output assignment; Terminal planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:327:y:2025:i:1:p:84-94

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.04.052

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