Two-Way Bounded Dynamic Programming Approach for Operations Planning in Transshipment Yards

Alena Otto (), Xiyu Li () and Erwin Pesch ()
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Alena Otto: Department of Management Information Science, University of Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany
Xiyu Li: Department of Management Information Science, University of Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany
Erwin Pesch: Department of Management Information Science, University of Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany; and Center of Advanced Studies in Management, HHL–Leipzig, D-04109 Leipzig, Germany

Transportation Science, 2017, vol. 51, issue 1, 325-342

Abstract: We propose a two-way bounded dynamic programming (TBDP) approach to deal with situations, when it takes a long time to evaluate the value function in the state graph of dynamic programming. TBDP provides sharp bounds early in the solution process and identifies critical subproblems, i.e., states and transition arcs, for which the value function has to be estimated.Based on the TBDP framework, we develop a heuristic and an exact algorithm for the static crane scheduling problem (SCSP). The SCSP refers to simultaneous yard partitioning into single-crane areas and job sequencing at railway container transshipment yards, where both rail-rail and rail-road transshipments are present and rail-rail moves are short. The designed exact solution algorithm solves instances of practically relevant size within acceptable time limits. The proposed heuristic finds optimal solutions in 90% of the cases. We recommend using the heuristic algorithm for planning very large transshipment yards, with more than five tracks and a large number of container moves per crane.

Keywords: crane scheduling; two-way bounded dynamic programming; dynamic programming; transshipment yards; parallel machine scheduling with time windows and sequence-dependent setup times (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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