A New Approach for Sequencing Loading and Unloading Operations in the Seaside Area of a Container Terminal

Due to the considerable growth in the worldwide container transportation, optimization of container terminal operations is becoming highly needed to rationalize the use of logistics resources. For this reason, we focus our study on the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP), which is a core task of managing maritime container terminals. From this planning problem arise two decisions to be made: The first one concerns tasks assignment to quay crane and the second one consists of finding the handling sequence of tasks such that the turnaround time of cargo vessels is minimized. In this paper, we provide a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model that takes into account non-crossing constraints, safety margin constraints and precedence constraints. The QCSP has been shown NP-complete, thus, we used the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a probabilistic technique inspired from ants’ behaviour, to find a feasible solution of such problem. The results obtained from the computational experiments indicate that the proposed method is able to produce good results while reducing the computational time.