Multistage collaborative scheduling of berth and quay crane based on heuristic strategies and particle swarm optimization

As the most important facilities Container terminals (CT) play a valuable role in international trade. The efficiency of quay side determines the productivity of the CT mostly. Considering continuous berth allocation (CBA) and quay crane assignment (QCA), the objective of this paper is to minimize the sum of extra cost of berthing at non-optimal location and penalty cost of time delay. A berth allocation heuristic strategy(BAHS) is provided to dispose continuous berth allocation problem. Due to different stages, quay crane assignment heuristic strategies at berthing (QCAHSB) and quay crane assignment heuristic strategy after departure (QCAHSD) are introduced. A hybrid model integrated with the two heuristic strategies and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to solve the collaborative scheduling of continuous berth and quay crane. Experimental results show that the hybrid model is available for the collaborative scheduling problem effectively.