Automated berth planning and quay crane allocation at a Dutch container terminal

This study addresses the Berth Allocation Problem for a continuous quay layout as well as the Quay Crane Allocation Problem. It investigates automated planning for a Dutch container terminal. Currently, all planning is done manually, however, the company wants to improve efficiency and change to automated planning. The objective and all features of the problem are identified after which a solution method is proposed. Two heuristics, Priority rule and Tabu search, are proposed for the BAP. A QC allocation heuristic is proposed to solve the QCAP and finalize the plans. Both methods are compared with an exact solution for small problem instances and a benchmark for realistic problem instances. The performance of the heuristics is approximately 35% worse compared to the exact solution. The performance of the Priority rule heuristic is 10% better than the benchmark, while Tabu Search is unable to outperform the benchmark. Finally, a dedicated improvement heuristic is proposed to improve the berth and crane plan. In the experiments, the improvement heuristic was unable to produce any significant improvements.