Scheduling Container Movements per Crane in Train-Train Transshipment Terminals Using Simulated Annealing

Train-train transshipment terminals are used to transship containers among trains. Scheduling container movements per crane (SCMC) is one of the sub-problems in train-train transshipment. The objective is to determine the sequence of container movements for each crane such that all containers are positioned on the appropriate train or on the yard, while minimizing the make-span. This study analyzes the sequence of container transshipment per crane in modern train-train transshipment terminals. We propose a simulated annealing (SA) based heuristic for solving the SCMC. The proposed SASCMC heuristic is tested on four sets of instances and the results are presented. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm improves the solution more than 15%.

Keywords:

Railway systems , Transshipment yards , Container handling , Crane scheduling , simulated annealing