An online model of berth and quay crane integrated allocation in container terminals

Abstract

Due to the frequent arrivals of real-time vessels beyond those being well planned in many container terminals, this paper studies an online over-list model of integrated allocation of berths and quay cranes in a container terminal. We consider a hybrid berth which consists of three adjacent small berths together with five quay cranes. The objective is to minimize the makespan or the maximum completion time of container vessels. Our focus is the case with two types of vessels in size which require different numbers of berths and QCs in service, and our main contribution is an optimal 4/3-competitive online algorithm.