Ports are one of transportation’s logistic components crucial to supporting international trade and economic growth. Increasing at an average annual rate of 16%, the Port of Savannah has been America’s fastest-growing port since 2001. Because of this rapid growth, there is a need to develop a cost-effective means to explore and evaluate new productivity improvement alternatives (e.g. a facility...

In automated container terminals, containers are transported between ships and storage yard by differen types of vehicles, for example, guided vehicle (AGV, yard crane (YC) and quay crane (QC). To improve the productivity of the automated container terminals, it is important to harmoniously synchronize operations of different types of container handling equipment. This paper examines the schedu...

This paper elaborates the different operations research methods used to solve container terminal operational decisions including terminal design, berth allocation, quay crane assignment, quay crane scheduling, container storage space allocation, container location assignment, retrieval, and premarshalling, as well as resource scheduling and terminal logistics in general. Solution methods includ...

We focus on the integrated seaside operations in container terminals, namely the integration of berth allocation, quay crane assignment and quay crane scheduling problems. We first develope a mixed-integer linear programming formulation. Then, we propose an efficient cutting plane algorithm based on a decomposition scheme. Our approach deals with berthing positions of the vessels and their assi...

Most of the operational problems in container terminals are strongly interconnected. In this paper, we study the integrated berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem in seaport container terminals. We will extend the current stateof-the-art by proposing novel set partitioning models. To improve the performance of the set partitioning formulations, a number of variable reduction techniq...

Due to the dramatic increase in the world’s container traffic, the efficient management of operations in seaport container terminals has become a crucial issue. In this work, we focus on the integrated planning of the following problems faced at container terminals: berth allocation, quay crane assignment (number), and quay crane assignment (specific). First, we formulate a new binary integer l...

The quay crane scheduling problem consists of determining a sequence of unloading and loading movements for cranes assigned to a vessel, in order to minimize the vessel completion time as well as the crane idle times. Idle times originate from interferences between cranes since these roll on the same rails and a minimum safety distance must be maintained between them. The productivity of contai...

This paper deals with the problem of constructing the schedule for the operations of a group of quay cranes devoted to discharge/load a set of groups of containers from a vessel at a maritime container terminal. The schedule is constructed starting from the assignment of each individual group of containers to a quay crane under the goal of minimizing the overall vessel completion time, aka the ...

Nowadays competition between port container terminals, especially between geographically close ones, is rapidly increasing. How to improve the competitiveness of port container terminals is, therefore, an immediate challenge, with which port operators are confronted. In terms of port competitiveness, the makespan of a container vessel, which is the latest completion time among all handling task...

In container terminals, discharging and loading of vessels are critical planning decisions which highly depend on the interaction between the quay cranes and internal trucks, they also have a significant impact on the terminal performance and revenue. Decisions on the assignments of quay cranes and internal trucks to the berthed vessels are typically made sequentially. However, the applicabilit...