Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/287152 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Scheduling [ISSN:] 1099-1425 [Volume:] 25 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] Springer US [Place:] New York, NY [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 3-34
Publisher: 
Springer US, New York, NY
Abstract: 
To enable the efficient division of labor in container yards, many large ports apply twin cranes, two identical automated stacking cranes each dedicated to one of the transfer zones on the seaside and landside. The use of a handshake area, a bay of containers that separates the dedicated areas of the two cranes, is a simple means to avoid crane interference. Inbound containers arriving in the transfer zone of one crane and dedicated to a stacking position of the other crane's area are placed intermediately in the handshake area by the first crane and then taken over by the second crane, and vice versa for outbound containers. Existing research only evaluates simple heuristics and rule-based approaches for the coordination of twin cranes interconnected by a handshake area. For this setting, accounting for precedence constraints due to stacking containers in the handshake area, we derive exact solution procedures under a makespan minimization objective. In this way, a comprehensive computational evaluation is enabled, which benchmarks heuristics with optimal solutions and additionally compares alternative crane settings (i.e., without workload sharing and cooperation with flexible handover). We further provide insights into where to position the handshake area. Our results reveal that when planning is too simple (i.e., with a rule-based approach), optimality gaps become large, but with sophisticated optimization, the price of a simplified crane coordination via a handshake area is low.
Subjects: 
Port operations
Container logistics
Twin cranes
Crane scheduling
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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