Title: Simultaneous assignment of quay cranes and internal trucks in container terminals

Authors: A. Karam; A.B. Eltawil; N.A. Harraz

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, School of Innovative Design Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), P.O. Box 179, New Borg El-Arab City, Postal Code 21934, Alexandria, Egypt ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, School of Innovative Design Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), P.O. Box 179, New Borg El-Arab City, Postal Code 21934, Alexandria, Egypt ' Production Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Lotfy El-Sied Street Off Gamal Abd El-Naser, Alexandria, Alexandria 11432, Egypt

Abstract: This paper studies the assignment of quay cranes to the berthed vessels and the assignment of internal trucks to each quay crane at container terminals. Previous studies have either dealt with the two planning decisions separately or ignored the internal truck capacity constraint when determining the assignments of the quay cranes, thus producing a handling plan of poor overall quality. This paper addresses the assignment of quay cranes and internal trucks simultaneously. A mixed integer programming model is used to assign quay cranes to each vessel and assign internal trucks to each quay crane. The proposed model is validated against an existing model from literature. Numerical experiments with the proposed model using actual container terminal data show that the proposed model reduces the average berthing stay per vessel compared to the existing models in literature in case of limited availability of internal trucks.

Keywords: quay crane assignment; internal trucks; container terminals; quay cranes; simultaneous assignment; mixed integer programming; MIP; average berthing stay.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2016.078012

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2016 Vol.24 No.1, pp.107 - 125

Received: 30 Sep 2014
Accepted: 31 Dec 2014

Published online: 31 Jul 2016 *

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