A comprehensive review and directions for future research on the integrated scheduling of quay cranes and automated guided vehicles and yard cranes in automated container terminals

Automated Container Terminals (ACTs) have attracted an increasing number of researchers over the last decade, compared to conventional terminals, because of their ability to increase terminal productivity and performance and cope with the increasing containerized trade volumes. Also, there ae several developments in the handling equipment used in ACTs to expand the terminal efficiency and serve large-size vessels efficiently and with lower costs. Due to the fact that in ACTs, all equipment is automatically controlled, interference avoidance between each pair of equipment is important to avoid any disruption or backlog of cargo. Therefore, integrated scheduling of ACT’s handling equipment has been one of the most effective ways to increase the terminal’s performance and equipment utilization and minimize costs. This paper presents a comprehensive review and analysis of the literature addressing the integrated handling equipment scheduling problem in ACTs. Based on the provided gap analysis, the paper discussed the possible directions for future research. After explaining the problem and its importance, the reviewed literature is classified based on four main categories: the type of the integrated problem, the solution techniques, the objectives, and the equipment type used in each study. The main outcome is that most papers that addressed the integrated scheduling problem of handling equipment in automated container terminals generally focused on scheduling only a single type of equipment, mostly the AVs, and assumed that the scheduling of other equipment is known in advance. This opens the arena for addressing the integrated problem as it is illustrated in this paper.