Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　In most of the busy container port terminals, rail mounted gantry cranes (RMGC) have become the main container handling equipment because they can provide higher capacity on existing yard space. However, a routing planning including three key decisions: where to pick containers, how many containers should be picked and how the RMGC moves among yard bays should be made to maintain the efficiency before the RMGC starts to work.
　　In order to enhance operation efficiency, some ports use more RMGCs to serve one gantry crane for loading export containers onto vessels, which makes the routing planning more complicated. In this research, a multi-objective programming model was formulated by time-space network for routing two RMGCs simultaneously when they are serving the same gantry crane. In addition, a heuristic algorithm composed of constraint programming and dynamic programming was developed to solve this problem.