Sea Container Terminals

Due to a rapid growth in world trade and a huge increase in containerized goods, sea container terminals play a vital role in globe-spanning supply chains. Container terminals should be able to handle large ships, with large call sizes within the shortest time possible, and at competitive rates. In response, terminal operators, shipping liners, and port authorities are investing in new technologies to improve container handling infrastructure and operational efficiency. Container terminals face challenging research problems which have received much attention from the academic community. The focus of this paper is to highlight the recent developments in the container terminals, which can be categorized into three areas: (1) innovative container terminal technologies, (2) new OR directions and models for existing research areas, and (3) emerging areas in container terminal research. By choosing this focus, we complement existing reviews on container terminal operations

Containership Load Planning with Crane Operations

Since the start of the containerization revolution in 1950's, not only the TEU capacity of the vessels has been increasing constantly, but also the number of fully cellular container ships has expanded substantially. Because of the tense competition among ports in recent years, improving the operational efficiency of ports has become an important issue in containership operations. Arrangement of containers both within the container terminal and on the containership play an important role in determining the berthing time. The berthing time of a containership is mainly composed of the unloading and loading time of containers. Containers in a containership are stored in stacks, making a container directly accessible only if it is on the top of one stack. The task of determining a good container arrangement to minimize the number of re-handlings while maintaining the ship's stability over several ports is called stowage planning, which is an everyday problem solved by ship planners. The horizontal distribution of the containers over the bays affects crane utilization and overall ship berthing time. In order to increase the terminal productivity and reduce the turnaround time, the stowage planning must conform to the berth design. Given the configuration of berths and cranes at each visiting port, the stowage planning must take into account the utilization of quay cranes as well as the reduction of unnecessary shifts to minimize the total time at all ports over the voyage. This dissertation introduces an optimization model to solve the stowage planning problem with crane utilization considerations. The optimization model covers a wide range of operational and structural constraints for containership load planning. In order to solve real-size problems, a meta-heuristic approach based on genetic algorithms is designed and implemented which embeds a crane split approximation routine. The genetic encoding is ultra-compact and represents grouping, sorting and assignment strategies that might be applied to form the stowage pattern. The evaluation procedure accounts for technical specification of the cranes as well as the crane split. Numerical results show that timely solution for ultra large size containerships can be obtained under different scenarios

Strategic allocation of cyclically arriving container vessels to inter-related terminals

We consider a port consisting of a cluster of inter-related terminals, where container vessels arrive cyclically. The problem is to strategically assign a terminal and a time interval of berthing to each of the vessels in the cycle. Restricting properties are terminal quay lengths and quay crane capacity. Conflicting objectives are i) minimizing the number of required quay cranes, ii) minimizing the amount of inter-terminal traffic and iii) minimizing the total weighted deviation from desired berthing intervals. We formulate both a straightforward and an alternative mixed integer linear program to model this system. Results show that the alternative model is much faster solvable and enables to optimize real-life problems within a couple of hours

Berth allocation planning in Seville inland port by simulation and optimisation

We study the problems associated with allocating berths for containerships in the port of Seville. It is the only inland port in Spain and it is located on the Guadalquivir River. This paper addresses the berth allocation planning problems using simulation and optimisation with Arena software. We propose a mathematical model and develop a heuristic procedure based on genetic algorithm to solve non-linear problems. Allocation planning aims to minimise the total service time for each ship and considers a first-come-first-served allocation strategy. We conduct a large amount of computational experiments which show that the proposed model improves the current berth management strategy

Models and new methods for the quayside operations in port container terminals.

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Dynamic discrete berth allocation in container terminals under four performance measures

In this paper we develop new models for the dynamic discrete berth allocation problem under four performance measures (PM). The models allow for both dynamic berth availability and dynamic arrival of vessels within the planning time horizon. The new formulation allows the four models to be compared in terms of both model complexities and solutions. The models were implemented using CPLEX. The paper also proposed four heuristics under one framework for solving large instances of the problem. The study shows that the choice of PM to optimise is very crucial as different optimised PMs lead to different degrees of satisfactions or terminal efficiency

Optimization at Container Terminals: Status, Trends and Perspectives (revised version)

International sea-freight container transportation has grown dramatically over the last years and container terminals represent nowadays a key actor in the global shipping network. Terminal managers have to face with an increasing competitiveness among terminals, which require more and more efficiency in container operations both along the quayside and within the yard: the objective is usually to minimize ships turnaround time, one of the main indicators of the terminal performance for the shipping companies. Moreover, the minimization of operational costs directly entails the achievement of competitive terminal fares, thus increasing the attractiveness for new customers. Operations research methods and techniques are therefore worth being used in optimizing terminal operations. In this work, we firstly give an overview of decision problems which arise in the management of a container terminal (e.g. berth allocation, quay crane scheduling, storage policies and strategies, transfer operations, ship stowage planning) and provide a review of recent papers in the OR literature. Then, starting from a collaboration with some of the busiest ports in Europe, we identify some critical issues: in particular, we discuss the impact that gate and transshipment operations have on the yard. We also focus on competition and cooperation issues among port market players and decision makers. Finally, we conclude by suggesting possible research tracks and open issues