As the world container volumes are soaring, container terminals form a very important chain in the global transportation network. It is a generally accepted view that the modelling of the dynamic and stochastic nature of the container terminal systems using analytical or closed form models is a complicated process and the use of such models is very limited. Hence, this paper presents a simulati...

Vessel discharge and load jobs in a container terminal can be divided into sequences, one for each assigned quay crane (QC). A QC sequence lists containers in their desired handling order. The common practice for operators is to make do with just this sequence, without generating a job schedule (i.e. desired start-times of handling each container). Operators who need job schedules generate crud...

__________________________________________________________ We consider the problem of coordinating the operations of two supply chain partners: a foreign shipping company and a domestic port. The two partners have conflicting business objectives, and the issue is to determine the optimal cycle time, by which the shipping company removes the empty containers from the domestic port, so that the j...

Two optimal algorithms, MTA* and MT-RBA*, are presented to find the optimal yard crane (YC) job sequence for serving a fleet of vehicles for delivery and pickup jobs with scheduled deadlines and predicted vehicle arrival times. The objective is to minimize the total tardiness of incoming vehicle jobs. This is important for minimizing vessel turnaround time. In the search for an optimal job sequ...

We study a scheduling problem that belongs to the yard operations component of the railroad planning problems, namely the hump sequencing problem. The scheduling problem is characterized as a single-machine problem with stepwise tardiness cost objectives. This is a new scheduling criterion which is also relevant in the context of traditional machine scheduling problems. We produce complexity re...

Over the last years, international sea freight container transportation has grown dramatically and container terminals play nowadays a key role within the global shipping network. Terminal’s operations have received increasing interest in the scientific literature and operations research techniques are more and more used to improve efficiency and productivity. In this work we provide an overvie...

A container terminal is a facility where cargo containers are transshipped between different transport vehicles. We focus our attention on the transshipment between vessels and land vehicles, in which case the terminal is described as a maritime container terminal. In these container terminals, many combinatorial related problems appear and the solution of one of the problems may affect to the ...

In response to the phenomenon that some container terminals are excess capacity and some others are overloaded because of the imbalance of transportation development, this paper proposed a 3D simulation model of operation system for the container terminal apron. First, we study the characteristics of operation system for container terminal apron. Second, a 3D simulation model of terminal apron ...

In this paper, we focus on a continuously deteriorating critical equipment which its failure cannot be measured by cost criterion. For these types of systems like military systems, nuclear systems, etc it is extremely important to avoid failure during the actual operation of the system. In this paper we propose an approach which constrains failure probability to a pre-specified value. This valu...

In the Multi-Spreader Crane Scheduling Problem (MSCSP), containers with identical dimensions but variable weights are arranged along a grid. A multi-spreader crane is used to lift all containers. The has m > 1 modes. When it in p th mode, can remove adjacent same row at time as long total weight of does not exceed loading capacity ? . Such takes h minutes. It also c , q minutes for switch from ...