Simultaneous Berth and Quay Crane Allocation Problem in Container Terminal

The simultaneous berth and quay crane allocation problem for container terminal is studied in this paper. Quay crane reassignment among berthed vessels is allowed to enhance the utilization of available quay crane capacity. Each bay's container handling task and quay crane reassignment moving time are considered in this problem. Such a problem can be viewed as an extension of single stage parallel machine scheduling problem for batch arrival jobs under manufacturing environment with additional specialized constraints. Berth and quay crane allocation among vessels are graphically represented, and three quay crane activities are differentiated to represent detailed assignment of quay crane resources to bays on different vessels. A heuristics of stepwise quay crane assignment based on vessel priority list and bay area partition is proposed. And such heuristics is embedded in a Parallel Genetic Algorithm to search for near-optimal solutions. The numerical experiment based on generated test instances shows the satisfying performance of the proposed algorithm.