Simultaneous assignment of quay cranes and internal trucks in container terminals

This paper studies the assignment of quay cranes to the berthed vessels and the assignment of internal trucks to each quay crane at container terminals. Previous studies have either dealt with the two planning decisions separately or ignored the internal truck capacity constraint when determining the assignments of the quay cranes, thus producing a handling plan of poor overall quality. This paper addresses the assignment of quay cranes and internal trucks simultaneously. A mixed integer programming model is used to assign quay cranes to each vessel and assign internal trucks to each quay crane. The proposed model is validated against an existing model from literature. Numerical experiments with the proposed model using actual container terminal data show that the proposed model reduces the average berthing stay per vessel compared to the existing models in literature in case of limited availability of internal trucks. Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.