A multi-vessel quay crane assignment and scheduling problem: Formulation and heuristic solution approach

• The problems of crane assignment and scheduling are closely interdependent.
• The problems are usually addressed separately due to their individual complexity.
• Solving them with a sequential approach can lead to suboptimal solutions.
• We develop a novel approach to simply address the integration of these problems.

This paper presents a new approach to analyze the integrated quay crane assignment and scheduling problem (QCASP). The problem determines the assignment of quay cranes to vessels and the sequence of tasks to be processed by each quay crane simultaneously, and accounts for important considerations such as safety margins between quay cranes (QCs), ordering conditions and vessel priority. Furthermore, QCs can travel from one vessel to another vessel whenever tasks are complete. The integrated problem is difficult to solve with exact methods due to its complexity. Therefore, a genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to solve the integrated QCASP. Computational results validate the performance of the proposed GA.