Research on Marine Terminal Logistics: Crane Double Cycling Models

Abstract

Marine terminals are the gateways in global distribution networks and play a vital role in completing the global supply chains. With the rapidly growing level of service requirement that shipping lines make of terminal operators, the efficiency of terminal operation is becoming a matter of business survival. Thus, a substantial amount of investment has been made in port developments, in both facilities and IT infrastructure especially over the last two decades. Pursuant to this inevitable trend in industry, we also observe that a rich body of research has emerged in the academia for the study of optimisation in marine terminal operations. This thesis focuses selectively, among other optimisation problems in marine container terminals, on the seaside planning and optimisation problems. As a viable and economic option to improve vessel productivity, which is regarded as the most critical key performance indicator in marine terminal operations, the crane double cycling strategy has received substantial interests from both academia and industry. However, the practical operation strategy for implementing such concept has been limited to a bare minimum partially due to a lack of practical research or practitioners’ fear for a change against the status quo. This is where the motivation for this research has arisen. This research is comprised of three original papers. Paper I provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the quay crane (QC) schedule problem and fills the gap in the literature by providing an exact model for preemptive schedules of bay-wise vessel operation. Paper II provides a comprehensive review on the research of crane double cycling problem and identifies that the next challenge in this research is in the formulation of the multi-quay crane double cycling problem. Thus, it presents the motivations and discussions on future research directions with a focus on practical constraints. Finally, Paper III presents the multi-QC double cycling model that this research is aimed at developing. As a computational study, the models presented in this research are based on computational and optimisation theory. Methodology section in the introductory chapter addresses the relevant theory and implementation perspective applied to each model: In Paper I, the QC scheduling problem is formulated into a mixed integer programming. Due to its - completeness, a relaxed formulation with Lagrangian relaxation is also presented. In Paper III, the multi-QC double cycling problem is formulated into an integer programming. Also due to its -completeness, a meta-heuristic approach is presented to cope with the computational intractability. Computational results are shown for analysis with discussions on the future research paths.