Scheduling crossover cranes at container terminals during seaside peak times

This paper deals with crane scheduling in a block of a container terminal equipped with two crossover cranes. We concentrate on the situation when all requests in this block refer to the seaside. This seaside peak time occurs when a container ship is berthed and has to be served as quickly as possible because berthing time is a major cost driver for both, the shipping company and the port operator. In this case, the two cranes highly interfere. We formulate this problem as a MIP, prove its (mathcal {NP})-hardness and introduce a lower bound. Further, we provide several heuristic solution procedures based on priority rules. A comparison of all procedures concludes this paper and gives insights on how to solve this problem in practice.