Integrated berth allocation and quay crane assignment under cooperation among multiple container terminals

As international trade thrives, terminal operators attempt to increase productivity to satisfy the growing demand and offer better services for customers. Cooperation among multiple terminal operators in a port is an option to better utilise the existing resources and achieve a high level of service without additional capital investment. To achieve an effective and efficient operation under cooperation, this study investigates a joint problem of berth allocation and quay crane assignment considering coordinated operation among multiple terminals in a port. Mixed-integer linear programming model considering operational constraints is developed to minimise the total operation cost, including the delay cost of vessels, transshipment cost of export containers and crane assignment cost. An adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm is proposed to solve the integer linear programming model and tested in a series of numerical experiments. Numerical results show that cooperation not only helps to reduce the total operation cost significantly but also increases the level of service by reducing the number of delayed vessels and their total delay time. Moreover, the proposed algorithm outperforms the commercial solver, Gurobi, with better convergence results and less computational time, which enables the proposed algorithm to be applied to large-scale real-world problems.