Integrated planning of berth allocation, quay crane assignment and yard assignment in multiple cooperative terminals

To further enhance the service level of a transshipment container port, this work considers terminal cooperation in terms of shore-side and yard-side resource sharing. This work proposes an integrated berth allocation, quay crane assignment and yard assignment problem in multiple cooperative terminals. In the proposed problem, container flow movements are classified into three types, i.e., import, export and transshipment containers, within a terminal and between terminals. A mixed integer nonlinear programming model is proposed for the proposed problem, aiming to minimize the total operating costs at all terminals considered. To address real-size instances, a tailored adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) embedded with column generation and CPLEX is proposed. Numerical experiments on different problem scales are provided to assess the proposed model and the proposed ALNS. Numerical experiments show that, i) the proposed algorithm can solve the instances with 4 terminals and 100 arriving vessels in less than 3 min; ii) compared with the two models without considering port cooperation and integrated optimization, the cost reduction obtained by our model is up to 14.02% and 22.00%, respectively.