Research Seminar Series: Scheduling of Crossover-Gantry Cranes

Abstract:

We focus on a container dispatching and conflict-free yard crane routing problem that arises at a storage yard in an automated, maritime container terminal. A storage yard serves as an intermediate buffer for import/export containers and exchanges containers between water- and landside of a maritime terminal. The considered storage yard is perpendicular to the waterside and employs two rail mounted gantry cranes that have different sizes and have thus the possibility to cross each other. The problem at hand evaluates in which order and by which crane the import/export containers are transported in order to minimize the makespan and prevent crane interferences. We solve this problem to optimality by a branch-and-cut approach that decomposes the problem into two problem classes and connects them via logic-based Benders cuts. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic approach and assess the quality of our solution methods in a computational study.

Biography

Dirk Briskorn is a Professor for Production and Logistics at the University of Wuppertal since 2014. After receiving his PhD from the University of Kiel he was Assistant Professor for Supply Chain Management at the University of Cologne from 2010 to 2011 and Professor for Quantitative Planning from 2011 to 2014. His research covers the development of Operations Research models and methods and application thereof in various fields such as container logistics, production planning, and services. His research outcome have appeared in numerous academic journals including IIE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, Discrete Applied Mathematics, and Omega.

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