Dynamic Scheduling of Handling Equipment at Automated Container Terminals

P.J.M. Meersmans and Albert Wagelmans

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of integrated scheduling of various types of handling equipment at an automated container terminal in a dynamic environment. This means that the handling times are not known exactly beforehand and that the order in which the different pieces of equipment handle the containers need not be specified completely in advance. Instead, (partial) schedules may be updated when new information on realizations of handling times becomes available. We present an optimization based Beam Search heuristic and several dispatching rules. An extensive computational study is carried out to investigate the performance of these solution methods under different scenarios. The main conclusion is that, in our tests, the Beam Search heuristic performs best on average, but that some of the relatively simple dispatching rules perform almost as good. Furthermore, our study indicates that it is effective important to base a planning on a long horizon with inaccurate data, than to update the planning often in order to take newly available information into account.

Keywords: beam search; container terminal; dispatching rules; dynamic scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C69 M M11 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-12-13
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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