Real Time Scheduling by Coordination for Optimizing Operations of Equipments in a Container Terminal

To maximize the productivity of a container terminal, it is important to have the operations of the equipments of different types optimized and synchronized. However, any attempt to search for a globally optimum operation schedule is prohibitive because of the real time constraint. The real time scheduling method proposed in this paper first generates schedules of individual equipments by using simple heuristics. Subsequently, the method analyzes the schedules to locate the job that causes the longest delay and tries to reduce the delay by adjusting the individual schedules of the relevant equipments. This adjustment process repeats until the quality of the schedules is satisfactory. Simulation experiments have shown that our method produces more efficient operation schedules in real time than other methods based on simulated annealing or heuristic-only strategies.