Study on Berth and Quay-crane Allocation under Stochastic Environments in Container Terminal

Abstract

Abstract Effective berth and quay-crane allocation improves service level of container terminal. For an efficient assignment, stochastic characteristic of containership arrival time and handling time is a key factor. A berth & quay-crane allocation model under stochastic environments is proposed in this article, so as to minimize the average waiting time of containership in terminal. However, it is solved in polynomial CPU time. So to obtain a good solution with considerably small computational effort, a genetic algorithm is developed with a reduced search set on its property. Numerical experiments show that the proposed model is capable of efficiently and dynamically allocating berths and quay-cranes to calling containerships in real stochastic environments and reflects the risk preference of decision-maker. And the solutions of GA are stable and satisfactory in acceptable CPU time.