A metaheuristic approach for the seaside operations in maritime container terminals

Abstract

The service time of the container vessels is the main indicator of the competitiveness of a maritime container terminal. This work proposes two Variable Neighbourhood Searches (VNS) in order to tackle the Tactical Berth Allocation Problem and the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem, which are the main operational problems in the seaside. These metaheuristics are integrated into a framework that provides an overall planning for the vessels arrived to port within a given time horizon. The performance of the proposed VNSs is compared with the most highlighted solution methods published in the related literature. In addition, the effectiveness of the framework is assessed in real size environments. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.