An Agent-Based Approach to Schedule Crane Operations in Rail-Rail Transshipment Terminals

Rail-rail transshipment terminals (RRTT) play the hub role in hub-and-spoke rail networks. In this type of terminals, containers are transshipped among freight trains by gantry cranes. This study aims at scheduling crane operations with an agent-based simulation approach to minimize the total transshipment time. The decisions to make include: the positions of containers on outbound trains; the assignment of container moves to cranes, as overlapping areas for the cranes’ operation are considered; the sequence of transshipments. The contribution of this paper is an agent-based approach to the crane operations scheduling problem in a RRTT framework. This approach is validated on a set of instances taken from the literature and the results compared against a variable neighbourhood descent algorithm.