Multi Quay Crane Scheduling Problem Based on ACO in Container Terminals

Quay crane scheduling problem is a very important multi resource scheduling problem in container terminals. This paper gives the general model of quay crane scheduling and introduces a heuristic method Ant Colony Optimization to resolve this problem. According to the advantages of ACO for single resource scheduling, virtual nodes are added into the scheduling graph to change the multi resource scheduling to single resource scheduling. The simulation of quay crane scheduling in practice get satisfactory results.