Joint deployment of quay cranes and yard cranes in container terminals at a tactical level

Abstract

This paper discusses tactical joint quay crane (QC) and yard crane (YC) deployment in container terminals. The deployments of QCs and YCs are critical for the efficiency of container terminals. Although they are closely intertwined, the deployments of QCs and YCs are usually sequential. This paper proposes a mixed-integer programming model for the joint deployment of QCs and YCs in container terminals. The objective of the model is to minimize the weighted vessel turnaround time and the weighted delayed workload for external truck service in yard blocks, both of great importance for a container terminal but rarely considered together in the literature. This paper proves that the studied problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed model can obtain better solutions than the sequential method. This paper also investigates the most effective combinations of QCs and YCs for a container terminal at various demand levels.