Abstract
Irregular external truck arrivals at a marine container terminal often leads to long queues at gates and substantial greenhouse gas emissions. To relieve gate congestion and reduce carbon emissions, a new truck arrival pattern called “vessel dependent time windows (VDTWs)” is proposed. A two-phase queuing model is established to describe the queuing process of trucks at gate and yard. An optimization model is established to assign time window and appointment quota for each vessel in a marine container terminal running a terminal appointment system (TAS) with VDTWs. The objective is to minimize the total carbon dioxide emissions of trucks and rubber-tired gantry cranes (RTGCs) during idling. The storage capacity constraints of each block and maximum queue length are also taken into consideration. A hybrid genetic algorithm based on simulated annealing is developed to solve the problem. Results based on numerical experiments demonstrate that this model can substantially reduce the waiting time of trucks at gate and yard and carbon dioxide emissions of trucks and RTGCs during idling.
Highlights
Maritime transport, as an economic and environmental friendly transport mode, is playing an increasingly important role in international trade [1]
This paper makes the following main contributions: (1) It combines terminal appointment system (TAS) with vessel dependent time window (VDTW), which can make truck arrivals at the terminal yard more controllable; (2) it considers the storage of export containers from the same vessel in different blocks, so that it can be guaranteed that the storage capacity limit is not exceeded under an optimized truck arrival pattern; (3) as a yard system is typically a bottleneck, this paper considers the constraint of the maximum queue length, so as to effectively control the congestion in the terminal yard; (4) considering the external trucks and rubber-tired gantry cranes (RTGCs) are both contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission during the receiving/delivery operations, this paper aims to reduce CO2 emissions produced by idling trucks and RTGCs
The chromosome is composed of the starting and ending points of the truck arrival time window of vessels, and each is coded by integer numbers
Summary
As an economic and environmental friendly transport mode, is playing an increasingly important role in international trade [1]. How to decrease the length of truck queues and increase handling efficiency of yard cranes in the terminal considering energy consumption is an important issue for the terminal operator, truck fleet, and government regulators. By assigning hourly entry quotas and the maximum amount of trucks that can be accepted per time window, the TAS can reduce truck arrivals in peak periods, alleviate congestion, and improve operation efficiency at the marine container terminal. A reasonable yard working plan can be made to enhance the utilization rate of yard cranes After these, both truck fleet and terminal operator can benefit from TAS. The truck arrivals are uncontrollable and it is difficult to effectively solve the congestion problem in the container terminal yard.
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