Determining Crane Areas in Intermodal Transshipment Yards: The Yard Partition Problem

Nils Boysen () and Malte Fliedner ()
Additional contact information
Nils Boysen: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Lehrstuhl für ABWL/ Operations Management
Malte Fliedner: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Lehrstuhl für ABWL / Operations Management

No 04/2009, Jena Research Papers in Business and Economics - Working and Discussion Papers (Expired!) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, School of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: At rail-road transshipment yards, gantry cranes move containers from freight trains to trucks and vice versa. They constitute important entities in today's intermodal transportation systems. Real-world yards are often partitioned into several disjunct crane areas, so that crane interferences during container transshipment are avoided. In practice, the lengths of such crane areas are typically determined by simple rules of thumb, i.e., each crane receives an equally sized area, which might result in an unleveled division of labor among cranes and, thus, prolong train processing times. This paper provides an exact solution procedure which determines disjunct yard areas of varying size for multiple gantry cranes in polynomial runtime, so that the workload for a given pulse of trains is equally distributed among cranes. Furthermore, we investigate the potential acceleration of train processing as compared to equally sized areas in a yard simulation.

Keywords: Intermodal transport; Transshipment yard; Container handling; Crane scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in: European Journal of Operational Research 204/2 (2010), 336-342.

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2009.10.031 (application/pdf)

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:jen:jenjbe:2009-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Research Papers in Business and Economics - Working and Discussion Papers (Expired!) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, School of Economics and Business Administration
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche ().