Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288472 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] OR Spectrum [ISSN:] 1436-6304 [Volume:] 42 [Issue:] 4 [Publisher:] Springer [Place:] Berlin, Heidelberg [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 995-1021
Publisher: 
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
Spotters (also denoted as switchers) are specialized terminal tractors, which are dedicated to the rapid maneuvering of semitrailers between parking lot and dock doors in large trailer yards. This paper is dedicated to spotter scheduling, i.e., the assignment of predefined trailer movements to a given fleet of spotters. The limited number of dock doors for loading and unloading is often the scarce resource during trailer processing, so that idle time of the bottleneck, e.g., caused by unforeseen delay in the yard, is to be avoided. In this setting, we aim to insert time buffers between any pair of subsequent jobs assigned to the same spotter, so that small delays are not propagated and subsequent jobs can still be executed in a timely manner. We formalize two versions of the resulting robust spotter scheduling problem and provide efficient algorithms for finding optimal solutions in polynomial time. Furthermore, we simulate delays during the execution of spotter schedules and show that the right robustness objective can greatly improve yard performance.
Subjects: 
Yard operations
Truck scheduling
Terminal tractor scheduling
Robustness
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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