Container pick-up scheduling problem is to minimize the total container handling time, which consists of the traveling distance and the setup time of yard cranes in a container yard. Yard cranes have to pick-up the containers which are stacked in the yard-bays to satisfy the work schedule requirement of quay crane, which loads and unloads containers on or from container ships. This paper allows the movement of multiple yard cranes among storage blocks. A mixed integer programming model has been formulated and a genetic algorithm (GA) has been proposed to solve problems of large sizes. Computational results show that the proposed GA is an effective method.