Integrated continuous berth allocation and quay crane assignment and scheduling problem with time-dependent physical constraints in container terminals

This paper presents an integer programming model for integrated continuous berth allocation, quay crane assignment and quay crane scheduling problem (BACASP) in container terminals where berthing possibility depends on water depth and tide conditions. The proposed model also considers the safe distance between quay cranes and the fact that they cannot cross each other on the rails. Given the NP-Hard complexity of the proposed model, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based meta-heuristic called the random topology particle swarm optimization algorithm (RTPSO) is developed for solving its large-size instances. To evaluate the performance of the developed RTPSO, its results are compared with the results of the exact solution and the basic PSO. The results illustrate the better performance of the proposed random topology particle swarm optimization algorithm in terms of accuracy and computational time.