English

In recent years the need for efficient processes in container terminals has grown due to the increasing volume of maritime transport. With the help of Automated Stacking Cranes (ASCs) which store and relocate containers in container terminals the container handling processes can be improved significantly concerning time and productivity. Within this work, elaborate planning procedures for two different ASC-settings are developed. First, a novel approach regarding the scheduling of triple-crossover-cranes is presented. Here, three cranes, consisting of a crossover-crane and two twin-cranes, work jointly in a storage block. While such a setup promises high productivity in container handling, interference between cranes likely increases. As a result, a fast branch-and-bound approach, that tackles the scheduling of cranes is developed, while conflicts between cranes are resolved by a sophisticated heuristic or exact procedure. Second, a scheduling approach for two twin-cranes that cooperate is presented. In this setting, containers enter and leave the block exclusively at the seaside access point, resembling e.g. the ongoing (un-)loading of a vessel. The storage block is divided into two seperate areas by a handshake bay and each of the cranes exclusively serves one of the areas. Whenever a container needs to be transported across that bay on its way to its final destination, it first is stored in one of multiple, capacitated storage slots within the handshake bay by one crane before afterwards the transport is completed by the respective other crane. Precedence constraints arising from stacking containers on top of each other are examined and multiple branch-and-bound approaches allowing to obtain minimum makespan schedules are developed.