AN ANT COLONY ALGORITHM FOR YARD TRUCK SCHEDULING AND YARD LOCATION ASSIGNMENT PROBLEMS WITH PRECEDENCE CONSTRAINTS

This paper examines the yard truck scheduling,the yard location assignment for discharging containers,and the quay crane scheduling in container terminals.Taking into account the practical situation,we paid special attention to the loading and discharging precedence relationships between containers in the quay crane operations.A Mixed Integer Program（MIP） model is constructed,and a two-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed.In the first stage an Ant Colony Optimization（ACO） algorithm is employed to generate the yard location assignment for discharging containers.In the second stage,the integration of the yard truck scheduling and the quay crane scheduling is a flexible job shop problem,and an efficient greedy algorithm and a local search algorithm are proposed. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithms.

An O(n) Time Algorithm for Scheduling UET-UCT of Bipartite Digraphs of Depth One on Two Processors

Given n unit execution time (UET) tasks whose precedence constraints form a directed acyclic graph, the arcs are associated with unit communication time (UCT) delays. The problem is to schedule the tasks on two identical processors in order to minimize the makespan. Several polynomial algorithms in the literature are proposed for special classes of digraphs, but the complexity of solving this problem in general case is still a challenging open question. We present in this paper an O(n) time algorithm to compute an optimal schedule for the class of bipartite digraphs of depth one.

Modified Shifting Bottleneck Heuristic for Scheduling Problems of Large-Scale Job Shops

A modified shifting bottleneck algorithm was proposed to solve scheduling problems of a large-scale job shop.Firstly,a new structured algorithm was employed for sub-problems so as to reduce the computational burden and suit for large-scale instances more effectively.The modified cycle avoidance method,incorporating with the disjunctive graph model and topological sort algorithm,was applied to guaranteeing the feasibility of solutions with considering delayed precedence constraints.Finally,simulation experiments were carried out to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the modified method.The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the large-scale job shop scheduling problems(JSSPs) within a reasonable period of time and obtaining satisfactory solutions simultaneously.

Concurrent processes scheduling with scarce resources in small and medium enterprises

Scarce resources,precedence and non-determined time-lag are three constraints commonly found in small and medium manufacturing enterprises(SMEs),which are deemed to block the application of workflow management system(WfMS). To tackle this problem,a workflow scheduling approach is proposed based on timing workflow net(TWF-net) and genetic algorithm(GA). The workflow is modelled in a form of TWF-net in favour of process simulation and resource conflict checking. After simplifying and reconstructing the set of workflow instance,the conflict resolution problem is transformed into a resource-constrained project scheduling problem(RCPSP),which could be efficiently solved by a heuristic method,such as GA. Finally,problems of various sizes are utilized to test the performance of the proposed algorithm and to compare it with first-come-firstserved(FCFS) strategy. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method is an overwhelming and effective approach for scheduling the concurrent processes with precedence and resource constraints.