Optimization of Gantry Crane Scheduling in Container Sea-Rail Intermodal Transport Yard

Abstract EN

In the face of rising container throughput and the tasks associated with collecting and dispatching these containers, contributions to the development of sea-rail intermodal transport are required to improve the capacity of container transportation.

According to the characteristics and the requirements of the operation of sea-rail intermodal transport, this paper puts forward a design for the transport yard which facilitates container loading and unloading.

Through the establishment of a mixed integer programming model, a flexible schedule for gantry crane operation can be realized, so that, during the planned period, the amount of task overflow in loading and unloading operations and the distance covered by all gantry cranes in the yard is minimized.

In addition, a genetic algorithm is designed to solve this model.

Finally, a specific example of the loading and unloading of a container train at the sea-rail intermodal transport yard is selected to verify the model and the algorithm.

The results show that the algorithm can reasonably schedule the gantry cranes to improve their loading and unloading efficiencies in the sea-rail intermodal transport yard.