INTEGRATED SCHEDULING OF EQUIPMENT FOR QUAYSIDE TRANSPORT IN AUTOMATED SEAPORT CONTAINER TERMINALS

Highly automated seaport container terminals like the CTA in Hamburg or the ECT in Rotterdam deploy automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to transport containers from quayside to yard and vice versa. Unlike straddle carriers or automated lifting vehicles, AGVs are not able to lift containers by themselves. They need either a quay crane or a yard crane to load and unload containers. Therefore, cranes and AGVs need synchronized schedules to avoid waiting times. Several problems have to be taken into consideration for integrated scheduling of the quayside transport: AGV dispatching, storage block assignment and yard crane scheduling. These problems occur frequently, i.e. a decision has to be made basically every second. For this reason it's necessary to find a solution for these problems within reasonable time, otherwise terminal operations will be halted until a decision will have been made. Strategies to solve these problems are usually examined by means of simulation, though it is still a major problem to benchmark these strategies. In this paper a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) is introduced which integrates AGV dispatching, storage block assignment and yard crane scheduling in order to calculate schedules for terminal equipment using ex post data. The results of the MILP can be used to benchmark real-time dispatching strategies.