Real-Time Dispatching of Rubber Tired Gantry Cranes in Container Terminals

Abstract

Within the past 50 years containerization and globalization have driven a change from small container terminals to large container terminals that need efficient logistic models to keep up with the significant growth in container traffic. Efficiently managing of rubber tired gantry cranes and planning container placement within the terminal are two ways to increase the overall efficiency of a terminal. In this thesis, we combine these strategies in a real-time dispatching tool using an approximate dynamic programming heuristic. The heuristic re-optimizes at the rate the quay crane handles containers, incorporating endogenous and exogenous information in each solution. We formulated and solved an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to estimate the heuristic's solution quality. The heuristic finds solutions within seconds and the absolute gap between the heuristic solution and the ILP solutions remained essentially constant as the size of the problem increased.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2008
Accession Number
ADA479957

Entities

People

  • Bradley S. Mcnary

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Programming
  • Containers
  • Cranes
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Gantries
  • Heuristic Methods
  • Linear Programming
  • Mathematical Models
  • Operations Research
  • Optimization
  • Scheduling (Production)
  • Shipping
  • Shipping Containers
  • Terminals
  • Travel Time
  • United States Naval Academy

Readers

  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • Logistics and Supply Chain Management.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.