Probability and Measure

In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unit-load-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology as well as appropriate optimization (operations research) methods. In this paper we describe and classify the main logistics processes and operations in container terminals and present a survey of methods for their optimization.

Container terminal operation and operations research — a classification and literature review

The current decade sees a considerable growth in worldwide container transportation and with it an indispensable need for optimization. Also the interest in and availability of academic literatures as well as case reports are almost exploding. With this paper an earlier survey which proved to be of utmost importance for the community is updated and extended to provide the current state of the art in container terminal operations and operations research.

Operations research at container terminals: a literature update

A survey of berth allocation and quay crane scheduling problems in container terminals

Introduction to Mathematical Statistics. By R.V. Hogg and A. T. Craig. Pp. ix, 245. 47s. 1959. (The Macmillan Company, New York)

Berth planning and resources optimisation at a container terminal via discrete event simulation

A queuing network model for the management of berth crane operations

The discharge/loading process of a single container ship by multiple quay cranes and shuttle vehicles moving back and forth from the quay to the yard and vice versa is focused in this paper. The core problem of this major operational issue reduces to finding the optimal assignment and optimal sequencing (schedule) of bays (jobs) processed by a fixed number of available cranes (machines). Under the classical assumption that machines have no release time and that their processing occurs with continuity, at a constant rate, in literature it has been tackled as a deterministic machine scheduling problem and formulated by integer programming as the quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP). Here, instead, the QCSP is viewed as a decisional step within an uncertain and dynamic logistic process where the quay cranes are the resources to be managed at the best, i.e., by minimizing the time spent waiting for each other due to conflicts, as well as the time wasted for blocking and starvation phenomena due to congestion occurring along the path from the quay area and to the stacking yard and vice versa. We present a simulation-based optimization (SO) model for this wider modeling problem with the objective of finding the schedule which optimizes a classical objective function. The search process for the optimal schedule is accomplished by a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, while performance estimation of the overall container discharge/loading process is provided by the simulation framework as a whole. Numerical experiments on a real instance are presented for tuning purposes of the SA procedure implemented within the simulator.

Rina Mary Mazza

Papers

Berth planning and resources optimisation at a container terminal via discrete event simulation

A queuing network model for the management of berth crane operations

Simulation-based optimization for discharge/loading operations at a maritime container terminal

Integrating tactical and operational berth allocation decisions via Simulation-Optimization

Simulation-based optimization for housekeeping in a container transshipment terminal