Abstract
This paper discusses the scheduling problem for loading outbound containers in container terminals. The problem is to determine a schedule that minimizes the makespan or time being taken to load a given set of outbound containers. An integrated model based on hybrid flow shop scheduling problem is developed. Two Metaheuristic algorithms are designed to solve the proposed model, the procedures are: initializing container sequence first; then allocating containers according to certain partitioning rule; and then improving the sequence by simulated annealing. Numerical experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed model and algorithms.
