A genetic algorithm heuristic for solving the quay crane scheduling problem with time windows

Narges Kaveshgar and Nathan Huynh
Additional contact information
Narges Kaveshgar: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, USA
Nathan Huynh: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, USA

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2015, vol. 17, issue 4, 515-537

Abstract: One of the most important operations in marine container terminals is quay crane scheduling. The quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP) involves scheduling groups of containers to be loaded and unloaded by each quay crane. It also requires addressing practical issues such as minimum spacing between quay cranes and precedence relationships between container groups. This study addresses the QCSP with one additional consideration: time availability of quay cranes. This problem is referred to as QCSP with time windows (QCSPTW) in the literature. This article discusses the genetic algorithm (GA) developed to solve the QCSPTW. It builds on a previously developed GA to solve the QCSP by the authors. The results of a large set of numerical experiments using benchmark instances highlight several key characteristics of the proposed solution approach: (i) the developed GA can provide near optimal solutions in a faster time for medium and large-sized instances (overall average gap is less than 3 per cent), and (ii) the developed GA leads to an improvement in the solution quality (lower vessel turnaround time) for instances with fragmented time windows (time windows that are broken up into two or more non-contiguous segments).

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v17/n4/pdf/mel201431a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v17/n4/full/mel201431a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:marecl:v:17:y:2015:i:4:p:515-537

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41278/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Maritime Economics & Logistics is currently edited by Hercules E. Haralambides

More articles in Maritime Economics & Logistics from Palgrave Macmillan, International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().