A polynomial-time heuristic for the quay crane double-cycling problem with internal-reshuffling operations

•We study the quay crane double-cycling problem with internal-reshuffling operations.•We formulate a new integer program based on new several observations.•We devise a fast heuristic, and analyze its worst-case error bound.•Computational experiments show that our algorithm is very efficient and robust.

One of great challenges in seaport management is how to handle containers under reshuffling, called reshuffles. Repositioning reshuffles in a bay (internal reshuffling) can improve the efficiency of quay cranes and help ports to reduce ship turn-around time. This paper studies the quay crane double-cycling problem with internal-reshuffling operations, and presents a fast solution algorithm. To reduce the number of operations necessary to turn around a bay of a vessel, the problem is first formulated as a new integer program. A polynomial-time heuristic is then developed. The analysis is made on the worst-case error bound of the proposed algorithm. Results are presented for a suite of combinations of problem instances with different bay sizes and workload scenarios. Comparisons are made between our algorithm and the start-of-the-art heuristic. The computational results demonstrate that our model can be solved more efficiently with CPLEX than the model proposed by Meisel and Wichmann (2010), and the proposed algorithm can well solve real-world problem instances within several seconds.