A new continuous berth allocation and quay crane assignment model in container terminal

Over the past decades, Chinese ports throughput grew rapidly, and more and more concerns were shown on the operational efficiency and effectiveness. Many studies have been made for scheduling berth and quay cranes, which are the critical resources in container terminals. In this paper, a two-phase model for berth allocation and quay crane assignment is proposed. In the first phase, according to the relationships of time and space between vessels, a new continuous berth allocation model is established, in which not only the common restricts but the coverage area of quay crane are considered. Then in the quay crane assignment phase, a multi-objective programming model is proposed, in which the first objective is to minimize the range of maximum and minimum quay cranes used for resources saving, and the second one is to minimize the movements of quay cranes so as to improve the efficiency. A particle swarm optimization algorithm for BAP was developed. The results of numerical experiments show that the proposed approach can improve the essential operations in container terminal.