Transporter Scheduling under Dynamic Block Transportation Environment

This paper considers a transporter scheduling problem under dynamic block transportation environment in shipbuilding. In dynamic situations, there exist the addition or cancellation of block transportation requirements. The transportation of the blocks in the shipyard has some distinct characteristics. Some blocks are available to be picked up at a specific time during the planning horizon while some other blocks need to be delivered before a specific time. These requirements cause two penally times: 1) delay time incurred when a block is picked up after a required start time, and 2) tardy time incurred when a block shipment is completed after the required delivery time. The blocks are located at different areas in the shipyard. The objective of this paper is to propose heuristic algorithms which minimize the weighted sum of empty transporter travel times, delay times, and tardy times. Four heuristic algorithms for transporter scheduling are proposed and their performance is evaluated through computational experiments.