Crane scheduling in a shipbuilding environment

Charlie Wen, Sandra Duni Eksioglu, Allen Greenwood and Shu Zhang

International Journal of Production Economics, 2010, vol. 124, issue 1, 40-50

Abstract: This paper describes exact and heuristic approaches for scheduling multiple cranes that service a shipyard that produces multiple ships concurrently. Cranes transport a variety of materials over a shared network of tracks; therefore, inter-crane interference is a major factor affecting makespan and crane utilization. The exact approach models the problem as a multi-commodity flow problem with side constraints on a network. The corresponding integer programming formulation is solved using CPLEX. The heuristics proposed decompose the problem in two sub-problems: a scheduling problem that determines the order in which jobs should be performed, and an assignment problem that assigns cranes to jobs. Computational results show that using the Priority/ACO (ant colony optimization) heuristic gives high quality solutions.

Keywords: Crane; scheduling; Ant; colony; optimization; Crane; interference; Shipbuilding; Integer; programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:124:y:2010:i:1:p:40-50

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