This section contains an overview of the different functional areas of a marine container terminal and a summary of the main types of container handling systems. The main advantages and disadvantages of each type of handling system are also summarized without focusing on technical details. 2.1 Functional Areas of Terminal Operations As every other terminal, a container terminal is a complex sys...

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...

Keywords: Container terminal Maritime shipping Block length Yard crane deployment Simulation Terminal design Gross crane rate As more and more container terminals open up all over the world, terminal operators are discovering that they must increase quay crane work rates in order to remain competitive. In this paper we present a simulation study that shows how a terminal's long-run average quay...

In the near future, container ports will no longer be able to expand into the surrounding land and will thus be unable to meet the storage requirements due to the boom in world trade. A solution to this problem is to increase the container throughput of the port by reducing the amount of time necessary to load and unload a ship. This paper presents distributed agent architecture to achieve this...

Keywords: Quay crane assignment Quay crane scheduling Genetic algorithms Integrated models a b s t r a c t This paper presents a new approach to analyze the integrated quay crane assignment and scheduling problem (QCASP). The problem determines the assignment of quay cranes to vessels and the sequence of tasks to be processed by each quay crane simultaneously, and accounts for important conside...

Crane sequencing in container terminals determines the order of ship discharging and loading jobs that quay cranes (QCs) perform so that the duration of vessels’ stay is minimized. The ship’s load profile, berthing time, number of available bays and QCs are considered. More importantly, clearance and yard congestion constraints need to be included, which respectively ensure that a minimum dista...