Integrated simulation and optimisation of scheduling yard crane and yard truck in loading operation

To further decrease turnaround time of container vessels, synchronous scheduling of yard crane (YC) and yard truck (YT) with the impact of quay crane (QC) is mainly considered. On this basis, the interference between YCs, YT pool strategy and other practical constraints, are also taken into consideration. Firstly, this problem formulated as a mixed integer programming model to minimise the makespan of loading operation. Due to the computational intractability, the multi-layers genetic algorithm is introduced to solve the problem with a simulation model, then an improved algorithm and an algorithm accelerating strategy are also designed to further improve the optimising efficiency. Finally, two sets of experiments with over 300 tests are conducted by eight elastic compute services on Alibaba Cloud to validate necessity of considering the impact of QC and the solution quality and effectiveness of the proposed methods.