An improved approach for the quay crane assignment problem with limited availability of internal trucks in container terminal

In container terminals, the handling operation of containers depends on the interaction among handling equipment such as quay cranes, yard cranes and internal trucks. Insufficient number of internal trucks causes a delay in transporting containers and results in low productivity of quay cranes which is the bottleneck of any container terminal. This paper presents a new approach for assigning quay cranes in container terminal taking into consideration the availability of internal truscks. A two phase solution methodology is proposed. In the first phase, a MIP model is formulated to assign quay cranes to vessels while in the second phase, dynamic programming is used to determine the specific quay cranes to serve each vessel. The validity of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a comparison against a case study from literature. Moreover, the results show that the shortage in the required number of internal trucks increases the average handling time per vessel.