A Variable Neighbourhood Search for Solving the Yard Crane Scheduling Problem in Container Terminals in Port of Sfax-Tunisia

Abstract

In this context, the objective of the gantry crane scheduling problem (GCSP) is to develop a schedule that minimizes the completion times of the RTGCs in the container storage areas. The makespan based on a set of container loading or unloading operations. This heuristic is able to find slot schedules with indicated capacity that are efficient for small instances, their performance decreases as the size increases. In this framework, a variable neighborhood search (VNS) was developed for the GCSP which contains a local search architecture to retain efficient solutions. Computational evaluations show that VNS is able to significantly outperform the results obtained by CPLEX.