Title: Solution techniques for a crane sequencing problem

Authors: Jin Shang, Alan R. McKendall

Addresses: Quality Planning Corporation, 388 Market Street, Suite 750, San Francisco, CA 94111, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, West Virginia University, 325A Mineral Resources Building, P.O. Box 6070, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

Abstract: In the areas of power plant maintenance, shipyard and warehouse management, resources (items) assigned to locations need to be relocated. It is essential to develop efficient techniques for relocating items to new locations using a crane such that the sum of the cost of moving the items and the cost of loading/unloading the items is minimised. This problem is defined as the crane sequencing problem (CSP). Since the CSP determines the routes for a crane to relocate items, it is closely related to some variants of the travelling salesman problem. However, the CSP considers the capacities of locations and intermediate drops (i.e. preemptions) during a multiple period planning horizon. In this article, a mathematical model and hybrid ant systems are developed for the CSP. Computational experiments were conducted to evaluate the performances of the proposed techniques, and results show that the proposed heuristics are effective.

Keywords: crane sequencing problem; CSP; hybrid ant systems; integer programming; metaheuristics; simulated annealing; mathematical modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2009.026276

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2009 Vol.1 No.4, pp.433 - 455

Published online: 05 Jun 2009 *

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