In this paper we deal with the preemptive asymmetric stacker crane problem in a heuristic way. We first present some theoretical results which allow us to turn this problem into a specific tree design problem. We next derive from this new representation an integer linear programming model together with simple and efficient greedy and local search heuristics. We conclude by presenting experimental results which aim at both testing the efficiency of our heuristic and evaluating the impact of the preemption hypothesis.
