Hybrid flow shop problem with blocking and multi-product families in a maritime terminal

Vehicle scheduling problem in maritime terminal is closely related to the cooperation and interference of different types of equipments. In this paper, vehicle scheduling problem in a maritime terminal using dual cycle operation is studied. The vehicle scheduling problem is defined as a three-stage hybrid flow shop problem with multi-product families and blocking. Due to the NP-hard of hybrid flow shop problem, a constructive heuristic algorithm based on machine's inventory and quota is developed. Performance of lower bound is characterized to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the developed algorithm. Results show that the proposed algorithm can give approximately optimal solutions with low computing cost, and it is very effective for large scale problems in practice.