Research On Berth Allocation And Crane Scheduling Problems In Container Terminals

Berth is the basis platform where a container terminal implements loading and unloading production operation for container ships. How to determine the docking location and dwell time for container ships as well as the number of all kinds of device configuration according to the requirement of stay time, and how to reduce waiting time of ships and machinery in this period in order to improve the overall operation efficiency have become the first problem of berth allocation that should be solved. Quay crane is the main equipment used to load and unload containers between container ships and the wharf apron, and it is expensive. The overall operation efficiency of container terminals depends on loading capacity and speed of quay crane directly. So it is imperative to improve the operation efficiency of quay crane through the coordination of loading and unloading tasks.This paper makes a systematic analysis and study on the background of logistics operation of container terminals. The optimization goal is to draw a more secure, quick and reasonable production scheduling plan of berth allocation and quay crane scheduling. The study in this paper can help improve the efficiency of logistics operation in container ports, reduce production cost and increase production yield. In this paper, the main work includes the following three aspects:1) We research on a continuous berth allocation problem in container terminals with the objective of minimizing the berthing time of container ships. According to the characteristic of the problem, an improved differential evolution algorithm is designed. For this problem, we solve the model that is already available in the literature by CPLEX. We compare the results obtained by the improved differential evolution algorithm with the results obtained by CPLEX. The experiment results prove that it is difficult for the optimization software CPLEX to directly obtain the optimal solution or to obtain the optimal solution within limited time for the large-scaled problems, and the improved differential evolution algorithm can get approximate optimal solutions in a very short period of time. So the effectiveness of the improved differential evolution algorithm is verified.2) We study the quay crane scheduling problem. A mixed integer linear programming model is established to minimize the total completion time of loading and unloading operation of container ships. The sequence of discharging and loading operation on each quay crane is determined. According to the characteristic of the problem, an improved differential evolution algorithm is designed. We compare the results obtained by the improved differential evolution algorithm with the results obtained by CPLEX. The experiment results demonstrate that for the large-scale problems, the improved differential evolution algorithm can get better results more quickly.3) Taking the actual logistics operation of a container logistics enterprise as background, this paper develops berth allocation module and quay crane scheduling module of the container terminal logistics optimization system. Affected by the dynamic factors of port logistics operation, the function of the system and the optimization of the algorithm need to be designed and improved adaptively to make the system well adapt to the changing environment of ports, that is to say, the system has strong robustness.