Effective algorithms for integrated scheduling of handling equipment at automated container terminals

In this paper we consider the problem of integrated scheduling of various types of handling equipment at an automated container terminal, where the objective is to minimize the makespan of the schedule. We present a Branch & Bound algorithm that uses various combinatorial lower bounds. Computational experiments show that this algorithm is able to produce optimal or near optimal schedules for instances of practical size in a reasonable time. We also develop a Beam Search heuristic that can be used to tackle very large problem instances. Our experiments show that for such instances the heuristic obtains close to optimal solutions in a reasonable time.