Modeling And Optimization Of Container Terminals Berth And Quay Cranes Integrated Robust Scheduling Problem

With the accelerating process of economic globalization, the trade among countries in the world has become increasingly frequent and maritime container transport has become an important link of the global supply chain. As a meeting point of maritime and land transportation, container terminals play the more and more important roles in the international transportation network. With the increasing of international competition and international trade volume, the container terminals are confronted with the austere challenges, and the resource optimization assignment problem of the container terminals has become a hot topic in the field of logistics. The researchers and managers in the logistics industry have been paying more and more attentions to the issues such as how to reasonably and effectively allocate berth and quay cranes resources, and especially how to improve the anti-interference ability of the berth and quay scheduling plan under uncertain environment. This thesis focuses on the robust planning problem of berth and quay crane integrated scheduling. The main contents are as follow.Firstly, the continuous berth and quay cranes integrated scheduling problem under uncertainty is studied. The mathematical model of berth and quay cranes integrated pre-scheduling plan based on time redundancy strategy is proposed. In the mathematical model the buffer time is introduced as the robustness metric and the weighted sum of the vessels’ planning delay time as the service metric. The mathematical model takes the number of the containers which are loaded on or unloaded from a vessel as the weight parameter of the vessel to measure the attention which are paid to the vessel by the decision-maker. In order to minimize the sum of the delay time of all the vessels and maximize the buffer time, the decision-maker must make decisions for each vessel the berthing time, berthing position at the terminal and the number of the quay cranes allocated to it. Due to the conflicts between the service measure and robustness, this thesis takes a trade-off between two measures through adjusting the weight parameters on the premises that the weighted sum of two measures is considered as the objective function.Then, the mathematical model of berth and quay cranes integrated pre-scheduling plan based on time redundancy strategy is deeply investigated and analyzed and some properties about the feasible solutions and the optimal solutions of the mathematical model are found. It is also found that there must exist an optimal “lower-left tight” plan. According the properties, an improved genetic algorithm is designed to search for optimal or approximately optimal “lower-left tight” plan and a relaxation approach is proposed to modified the “lower-left tight” plan. The effectiveness of the proposed model and the algorithm is verified by some simulation experiments.Finally, the mathematical model of real-time quay cranes scheduling is proposed. To reduce disturbance of uncertain factors in the operation process of the berth and quay crane integrated scheduling plan, the real-time scheduling strategy can be found through solving the mathematical model. The results of the simulation experiments show that the real-time scheduling of quay cranes can further reduce adverse effects of uncertain disturbances.