Yard crane scheduling at container terminals: A comparative study of centralized and decentralized approaches

This article presents a comparative study of two contrasting approaches for modeling the yard crane scheduling problem: centralized and decentralized. It seeks to assess their relative performances and factors that affect their performances. Our analysis shows that the centralized approach outperforms the decentralized approach by 16.5 per cent on average, due to having complete and accurate information about future truck arrivals. While it underperforms the centralized, the decentralized approach can dynamically adapt to real-time truck arrivals, making it better suited for real-life operations. Overall, our analysis suggests that the two approaches offer complementary features that could be integrated into a hybrid approach.