Dispatching Rules for Scheduling Twin Automated Gantry Cranes in an Automated Railroad Container Terminal

Due to the considerable growth in worldwide container transportation, the configurations of facility and operating processes need to be optimized in container terminals. This paper studies a novel scheduling problem for twin automated gantry cranes with a handshake area encountered in railroad container terminals. The handshake area is a temporary storage place where one gantry crane drops a container there for another crane to complete the movement. A limited random search method is designed to produce the operation sequence of cranes. Four interference-handling rules and four combined sequence rules are proposed to obtain the movement scheme of twin cranes based on First Come First Serve strategy. Computational experiments are implemented to investigate the performance of these rules. The results show the combined sequence rules outperform the interference-handling rules, and the best rule is C2-OH. For the C2-OH rule, the priority of handling tasks is assigned to right-side crane and splitting-tasks are handled first. When twin cranes request to enter the handshake area simultaneously, right-side crane must leave without load immediately after unloading. Meanwhile, the twin cranes always choose the nearest task to handle until all have been completed. The runtime of C2-OH rule is very short and can be used to produce a schedule for real operations.