Professor Erwin Pesch, from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University in Siegen, will present the Department of Statistical Science seminar with a talk entitled, "Preventing Crane Interferences at Automated Container Terminals". 

Erwin Pesch is a full professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University in Siegen and director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Management (CASiM) at the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. His CV may be found at https://www.wiwi.uni-siegen.de/mis/team/pesch/

Abstract:
In this research, we focus on a container dispatching and conflict-free  yard crane routing problem that arises at a storage yard in an
automated, maritime container terminal. A storage yard serves as an  intermediate buffer for import/export containers and exchanges
containers between water- and landside of a maritime terminal. The  considered storage yard is perpendicular to the waterside and employs two rail mounted gantry cranes that have different sizes and have thus  the possibility to cross each other. The problem at hand evaluates in which order and by which crane the import/export containers are  transported in order to minimize the makespan and prevent crane interferences. We solve this problem to optimality by a branch-and-cut  approach that decomposes the problem into two problem classes and connects them via logic-based Benders constraints. We assess the quality  of our solution method in a computational study.