Abstract
Despite a significant number of studies that have focused on the operational efficiency of container terminals, existing literature has paid little attention to improving energy efficiency, e.g., energy consumption and negative externalities in container terminals. Most researchers consider energy-saving goals when allocating berths and quay cranes to vessels, assuming that internal trucks are in sufficient supply. Furthermore, recent studies have revealed that shortage of internal trucks has become an issue that greatly affects the operational and energy efficiencies of container terminals. This work presents a planning model that integrates berth allocation, quay crane assignment, and internal truck assignment problems. The developed model contributes to existing literature by including energy-saving goals in the integrated planning of these problems, as well as including important realistic factors such as shortages of internal trucks and handling time estimations, thus producing a reliable handling plan that achieves energy and cost savings without additional truck investment. To solve realistic problems, a Lagrangian relaxation-based method is developed. Furthermore, the benefits of the developed approach are demonstrated by comparing it to an existing approach. On average, our approach could improve the solutions of the integrated problem with different numbers of internal trucks by 6% compared to the solutions obtained using the existing approach.
Highlights
Today, maritime transport has become an essential element of supply chains of services and products: more than 80% of global freight transport is by sea
The quay crane assignment problem (QCAP) calculates how many quay cranes (QCs) are assigned to each vessel, while the internal truck assignment problem (ITAP) calculates how many internal trucks (ITs) are assigned to the QCs that handle the containers on the vessel
This paper presents a new approach that simultaneously integrates the berth allocation problem (BAP), the QCAP, and the ITAP with important practical aspects, such as the berth deviation factor, the handling time estimation, energy-saving goals, and limited time-variant quay crane assignments
Summary
Maritime transport has become an essential element of supply chains of services and products: more than 80% of global freight transport is by sea. Vahdani et al [22] presented a two-objective optimization approach for simultaneous integration of the QCAP as well as the ITAP that considered the sharing of ITs between adjacent container terminals Their model aimed to overcome the limited availability of ITs by sharing them among different terminals. This paper presents a new approach that simultaneously integrates the BAP, the QCAP, and the ITAP with important practical aspects, such as the berth deviation factor, the handling time estimation, energy-saving goals (for vessels, QCs, and ITs), and limited time-variant quay crane assignments. The proposed integrated approach considers an operational bottleneck problem (the limited availability of ITs) and different objectives such as the service level for vessels (minimizing delayed departures) and emission-related externalities from vessels at port, QCs, and ITs. To date, environmental aspects have not been considered in the integrated planning of the BAP, QCAP, and ITAP.
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