Abstract
The problem of scheduling quay cranes (QCs) to coming vessels with different arrival (ready) times at the container terminal is studied with the objective of minimizing the maximum departure delay of vessels. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed for the problem and the complexity of the problem is discussed. It is difficult to solve the model directly because of its large size. A heuristic approach is proposed to decompose the problem into two levels to facilitate problem solving. An algorithm of obtaining a lower bound is proposed to evaluate the performance of the heuristic approach. Computational experiments are carried out and the results show that the proposed heuristic approach is efficient.