A heuristic methods for stacker and reclaimer scheduling problem in coal storage area

Coal storage area at dry bulk terminals act as temporary storage for transferring of coal to the consuming processes. The operation efficiency of dry bulk terminals heavily depends on the productivity of stacker and reclaimer machines. This paper discusses stacker and reclaimer scheduling problem with the aim of minimizing the maximum completion time for a given set of handling operations. A mixed integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the operation of stacker and reclaimer, was formulated. Since the present problem is NP-hard in nature, two heuristic methods, branch and bound method and tabu search algorithm, are developed to solve the problem optimally.