Integrated internal truck, yard crane and quay crane scheduling in a container terminal considering energy consumption

• Energy-saving objective is considered in the container terminal operations.
• A MIP model for the integrated scheduling of cranes and trucks is developed.
• A simulation optimization method is proposed to solve the NP-hard problem.
• Experimental results show that the proposed method can realize port energy-saving.

Container terminals mainly include three types of handling equipment, i.e., quay cranes (QCs), internal trucks (ITs) and yard cranes (YCs). Due to high cost of the handling equipment, container terminals can hardly purchase additional handling equipment. Therefore, the reasonable scheduling of these handling equipment, especially coordinated scheduling of the three types of handling equipment, plays an important role in the service level and energy-saving of container terminal. This paper addresses the problem of integrated QC scheduling, IT scheduling and YC scheduling. Firstly, this problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming model (MIP), where the objective is to minimize the total departure delay of all vessels and the total transportation energy consumption of all tasks. Furthermore, an integrated simulation-based optimization method is developed for solving the problem, where the simulation is designed for evaluation and optimization algorithm is designed for searching solution space. The optimization algorithm integrates genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, where the GA is used for global search and the PSO is used for local search. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can coordinate the scheduling of the three types of handling equipment and can realize the optimal trade-off between time-saving and energy-saving.