Berth and quay crane allocation and scheduling with worker performance variability and yard truck deployment in container terminals

In a container terminal, the quay cranes (QCs) are the main equipment involved in the core activities. According to a bottleneck principle, the productivity rate of QCs is related to both worker productivity and deployed yard trucks. Yet, in the literature, the berth and quay cranes allocation and scheduling problems were addressed separately from these two parameters. In contrast, practitioners confirm their important impact on cranes productivity and efficiency. This paper proposes a new extension of the berth and quay cranes allocation and scheduling problems considering worker performance variability and yard truck deployment constraints. First, we formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program to minimize the vessels departure time under many practical regulations involving the work roster constraints specific to container terminals and the trucks utilization congestion targets. Additionally, the study provides a computationally efficient method to find a lower bound. We also show that integrative planning minimizes the vessels departure time compared to the separated decision-making process. Second, to build good solutions in a reasonable time, we propose a heuristic and a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) with a new architecture and settings designed to suit the novel issues of the tackled problem. The algorithm is tested on real time data sets and outperforms a commercial solver. This study originates from our experience with a multinational company managing a container terminal. Thus, we have embedded the proposed resolving methods in a decision-support system for our industrial partner.