Yard crane (YC) scheduling is another critical component of the efficient operation of a container terminal. The yard is typically divided into several storage blocks and YCs are used to transfer containers between these storage blocks and trucks (or prime movers). YCs are either rail mounted or rubber wheeled. The rubber wheeled YCs have the flexibility to move from one yard block to another while rail mounted YCs are restricted to work on a single yard block.

[@young1999routing] study the problem of minimizing the sum of the set up times and the travel times of single YC. Their mixed integer programming model determines the optimal route for the YC as well as the containers to be picked up by the YC in each of the storage blocks. Because of the excessive solve times of the mixed integer program for large instances, two heuristics are proposed in [@NAV:NAV10076].

[@zhang2002dynamic] study the problem of scheduling a set of YCs covering a number of storage blocks so as to minimize the total tardiness (or delays). A mixed integer program model determines the number of YCs to be deployed in each storage block in each planning period and a lagrangian relaxation based heuristic algorithm 