Transshipment scheduling at a single station with release date and inventory constraints

We study a loading and unloading scheduling problem in a single station transshipment terminal, in which inventory and release date constraints are subjected and the objective is to minimize the makespan. We propose an integer linear programming model; as well as a heuristic algorithm and two exact solution approaches: a dynamic programming algorithm and a brand-and-bound algorithm. Finally, performances of the developed algorithms are compared and analyzed using randomly generated test instances. Regarding the computational results, it is revealed that the simple developed heuristic algorithm is very fast and efficient. Also, the branch-and-bound algorithm outperforms the dynamic programming algorithm.