Integrated Waterway Scheduling, Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment Problem by Using a Hybrid Flow Shop Concept

Abstract

Port operators mainly deal with three scheduling problems, namely waterway scheduling, berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem. Providing an efficient schedule in these areas for ships will decrease their waiting time at ports, which in turn enhances port’s competitiveness. Trying to do so, there are technical limitations at ports, including draft limit of ships, tidal impacts on water level, adaptability of infrastructure and shape of wharfs with incoming vessels and total number of available quay cranes, which are needed to be considered. In addition, in this research, vessels are not required to arrive at the port area at the beginning of the planning horizon. Furthermore, a safety distance between vessels moving in the same direction is needed to be shed light on in order to avoid collision. Since the above stages are closely related together, solving them separately may yield sub-optimal solutions. Therefore, in this research, a mixed-integer programming model is presented to solve three mentioned problems in an integrated way. It is worth mentioning that the aforementioned stages are similar to a hybrid flow shop problem with unrelated parallel machines under a machine eligibility constraint. Consequently, this approach is adopted for modeling the problem.