Determining fixed Crane Areas in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Rail-rail transshipment yards are an emerging and more e cient alternative to traditional shunting yards. Instead of a time-consuming reshu ing of railcars via shunting hills, in these modern yards, huge gantry cranes tranship containers between di erent freight trains. As multiple cranes process the trains in parallel, it is an important operational task to avoid interferences among cranes. To ensure smooth crane operations, it is a widespread real-world policy to assign each crane to an exclusive yard area. In such a setting, each crane's workload heavily depends on the length and location of its respective yard area. The paper on hand provides an exact Dynamic Programming procedure with polynomial runtime, which determines crane areas, so that the resulting workload is evenly spread among cranes and, thus, train processing is accelerated. Furthermore, in a straightforward simulation of transshipment yard operations, the e ect of optimal crane areas versus equally sized areas is studied, the latter being a common real-world policy. The results indicate a remarkable speed-up of train processing if optimal crane areas are applied.