A comprehensive review of quay crane scheduling, yard operations and integrations thereof in container terminals

Abstract

Over the past decades, container transportation has achieved considerable growth, and maritime trade now constitutes 80% of the global trade. The vessel sizes increased in parallel, up to 21,400 TEU (Twenty-foot-equivalent unit container). Accordingly, global containerized trade reached up to 150 million TEU in 2017 (UNCTAD 2018). This growth brings the need to use scientific methods to manage and operate container terminals more economically throughout the globe. In order to manage container transshipment and to use large vessels efficiently, the docking time at the container port for each vessel should be minimized. The decrease in the docking time enables the vessel to move to its next destination faster, decreasing turnover time and facilitating more containers to be transported. Container terminals can be divided into five main areas as the berth, the quay, the storage yard, the transport area, and the gate. The vessels must be berthed in suitable positions, after which many containers have to be unloaded or loaded via quay cranes, transshipped by vehicles inside the terminal, and stacked by yard cranes to suitable positions, all by using expensive equipment. With the invention of new technologies, the bottleneck at the berth side is almost overcome; however, the yard and the quayside operations have to be further perfected to obtain efficient plans. In this comprehensive literature review study, we aim to combine the literature on both yard and quayside operations, carefully examining independently studied problems as well as integrated ones. General information about port operations and relevant literature is provided. For the quayside, the literature on quay crane assignment and scheduling problems is investigated, whereas, for the yard side, yard crane scheduling, transport vehicle dispatching and scheduling, vehicle routing and traffic control, and storage location and space planning problems are reviewed in depth. In addition to these individual problems, their integrations are also analyzed, relevant publications and their respective contributions are explained in detail. Besides the milestone papers that lead the literature on container terminals, recent publications and advances are also reviewed, and managerial insights and future research directions are identified.

Integrated Simulation-Based Optimization of Operational Decisions at Container Terminals

“…For each scenario (3,4,5, and 6 QCs) and meta-heuristic (TPE, BO, SA, and RS), 50 optimization runs are executed. This allows for gaining insights on the reproducibility of the optimization results using meta-heuristics.…”

“…In the scope of the optimization study, 40,000 experiments in total were evaluated. For each scenario (3,4,5,and 6 QCs) and each meta-heuristic (TPE, BO, SA, and RS), 50 optimization runs were executed, each consisting of 50 experiments. This set of experiments covers many randomly chosen experiments (e.g., RS or initialization phase of any of the meta-heuristics) in addition to experiments that are biased by the manner in which each meta-heuristic works during its search process.…”

“…On the land side, there are also questions of order assignment and gate control. Kizilay and Eliiyi [5] provide a recent overview of container terminal decision problems.…”

Integrated Simulation-based Optimization of Operational Decisions at Container Terminals

“…On the land side there are also the questions of order assignment and gate control. Kizilay and Eliiyi [4] provide a recent overview on container terminal decision problems.…”

A Model for Developing Existing Ports Considering Economic Impact and Network Connectivity

“…Our study has received investment for the purpose of increasing the processing capacity of the terminal's seaside, which mainly depends on the designed and operational capacities of the berths [8][9][10] and the number of installed quay cranes. Many attempts have been made to ensure the quay cranes operate with high utilization through efficient quay crane assignment, quay crane scheduling, and double cycling operation to increase the terminal's capability of handling more containers from/to the vessels [11]. The terminal's productivity improvement from the increase in the length of the berth and the number of installed quay cranes might be limited by the noncrossing constraints between quay cranes [12] and the capacity of other related equipment in the terminal's landside-e.g., yard crane and internal trucks [13,14].…”