Generalized best-first search strategies and the optimality of A*
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
An Optimal Routing Algorithm for a Transfer Crane in Port Container Terminals
Transportation Science
Analysis and Algorithms for the Transtainer Routing Problem in Container Port Operations
Transportation Science
Interblock Crane Deployment in Container Terminals
Transportation Science
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Rubber tired gantry crane deployment for container yard operation
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Capacity analysis of container terminals using simulation techniques
International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology
Integrating simulation and optimization to schedule loading operations in container terminals
Computers and Operations Research
Yard crane dispatching based on real time data driven simulation for container terminals
Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation
Simulation-based dynamic partitioning of yard crane workload for container terminal operations
SpringSim '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Spring Simulation Multiconference
A three-level hierarchical workload management scheme for yard cranes in container terminals
ICCL'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational logistics
Tugboat scheduling problem based on trust-based ant colony optimization
ICICA'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Information Computing and Applications
Embedding simulation in yard crane dispatching to minimize job tardiness in container terminals
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Reducing simulation costs of embedded simulation in yard crane dispatching in container terminals
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSIM conference on Principles of advanced discrete simulation
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The performance of a container terminal depends on many aspects of operations. This paper focuses on the optimal sequencing of a yard crane (or YC for short) for serving a fleet of vehicles for delivery and pickup jobs. The objective is to minimize the average vehicle waiting time. While heuristic algorithms could not guarantee an optimal solution, a conventional mathematical formulation such as mixed integer program would require too much computing time. We present two new algorithms to efficiently compute YC dispatching sequences that are provably optimal within the planning window. The first algorithm is based on the well-known A^* search along with an admissible heuristics. We also incorporate this heuristics into a second backtracking algorithm which uses a prioritized search order to accelerate the computation. Experimental results show that both new algorithms perform very well for realistic YC jobs. Specifically, both are able to find within seconds optimal solutions for heavy workload scenarios with over 2.4x10^1^8 possible dispatching sequences. Moreover, even when the vehicle arrival times are not accurately forecasted, the new algorithms are still robust enough to produce optimal or near-optimal sequences, and they consistently outperform all the other algorithms evaluated.