A solution approach to the daily dockworker planning problem at a port container terminal

Abstract

This study focused on vital resources at port container terminals such as quay cranes and dockworkers. We studied the impact of incorporating the dockworker assignment problem (DWAP) into the quay crane assignment problem (QCAP). The aim of this study was to formulate and solve an integrated model for QCAP and DWAP, with the objective of minimizing the total costs of dockworkers, by optimizing workers' assignment, so that the ships' costs due to the time spent in the port are not increased. We proposed an integrated solution approach to the studied problem. Our proposed model has been validated on an adequate number of instances based on the real data. Obtained solutions were compared with the solutions obtained by the traditional sequential approach. It was demonstrated that, for all solved instances, our proposed integrated approach resulted in a reduction in the total costs of dockworkers. The major contribution of this study is that this is the first time that these two problems were modeled together. The obtained results show significant savings in the overall costs.