Twin-crane scheduling during seaside workload peaks with a dedicated handshake area

Lennart Zey (), Dirk Briskorn () and Nils Boysen ()
Additional contact information
Lennart Zey: Bergische Universität Wuppertal Professur für BWL, insbesondere Produktion und Logistik
Dirk Briskorn: Bergische Universität Wuppertal Professur für BWL, insbesondere Produktion und Logistik
Nils Boysen: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Lehrstuhl für Operations Management

Journal of Scheduling, 2022, vol. 25, issue 1, No 2, 3-34

Abstract: Abstract To enable the efficient division of labor in container yards, many large ports apply twin cranes, two identical automated stacking cranes each dedicated to one of the transfer zones on the seaside and landside. The use of a handshake area, a bay of containers that separates the dedicated areas of the two cranes, is a simple means to avoid crane interference. Inbound containers arriving in the transfer zone of one crane and dedicated to a stacking position of the other crane’s area are placed intermediately in the handshake area by the first crane and then taken over by the second crane, and vice versa for outbound containers. Existing research only evaluates simple heuristics and rule-based approaches for the coordination of twin cranes interconnected by a handshake area. For this setting, accounting for precedence constraints due to stacking containers in the handshake area, we derive exact solution procedures under a makespan minimization objective. In this way, a comprehensive computational evaluation is enabled, which benchmarks heuristics with optimal solutions and additionally compares alternative crane settings (i.e., without workload sharing and cooperation with flexible handover). We further provide insights into where to position the handshake area. Our results reveal that when planning is too simple (i.e., with a rule-based approach), optimality gaps become large, but with sophisticated optimization, the price of a simplified crane coordination via a handshake area is low.

Keywords: Port operations; Container logistics; Twin cranes; Crane scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10951-021-00710-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jsched:v:25:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s10951-021-00710-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10951

DOI: 10.1007/s10951-021-00710-w

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Scheduling is currently edited by Edmund Burke and Michael Pinedo

More articles in Journal of Scheduling from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().