). But the current scheduling method in railway container terminal cannot meet the developing demands of container transportation in China. So it is necessary for railway container terminals to optimize resources utilization. As a key resource in railway container terminals, RMGC is responsible for containers Lenvatinib VEGFR Inhibitors handling and stockpiling in main operation area. An RMGC scheduling specifies the handling sequence of containers among trains, trucks, and blocks and the time schedule for handling tasks. The RMGC scheduling is a vital

part of resources utilization in railway container terminals. In this paper, we formulate and solve the RMGC scheduling problem in railway container terminal under hybrid handling mode. The rest of paper is organized as follows. The relevant

literature is reviewed in Section 2. The RMGC scheduling problem is described in Section 3 and formulated in Section 4. An ant colony optimization is developed in Section 5. Computational results are reported in Section 6 and finally Section 7 covers the conclusion. 2. Literature Review RMGC scheduling problem of railway container terminal belongs to the crane scheduling problem (CSP) which is defined as allocating cranes to handle the loading-unloading operations according to the handling modes and rules with the aim of determining optimization handling sequence in order to minimize the makespan or total completion time of handling task. According to the different kinds of terminals, CSP can be divided into CSP in marine container terminals and CSP in railway container terminals. The CSP in marine container terminals is the hotspot of CSP research and can be classified into quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP) and yard crane scheduling

problem (YCSP). Daganzo first discussed the QCSP in 1989 and presented exact and approximate solution methods for determining the number of cranes to assign to ship bays of multiple vessels [1]. Based on the study of Daganzo, Peterkofsky and Daganzo proposed a branch and bound method for practical quay crane scheduling problem. However, the above studies did not consider the interference among QCs or precedence relationships among tasks [2]. Kim and AV-951 Park further investigated QCSP by considering various interference possibilities between adjacent cranes and proposed a mixed integer programming model to determine starting and ending times for each quay crane to serve each ship bay [3]. Ng and Mak considered the QCSP and proposed a heuristic algorithm, which first decomposes the difficult multicrane scheduling problem into easier subproblems by partitioning the ship into a set of nonoverlapping zones [4]. Lee et al. proved the QCSP with noninterference constraints is NP-complete and provided a more concise mathematical model of QCSP [5].