Study of the Master Bay Plan Problem Based on a Twin 40-Foot Quay Crane Operation

Abstract

During the process of container ship transportation, the berthing time cost of the ship in port is extremely important. Container allocation and quay crane (QC) operation greatly affect the berthing time. Currently, few scholars have combined import/export container allocation and QC operation, making it urgent to study ship stowage and QC collaboratively. In this paper, a mixed-integer programming model is established for the ship multi-port master bay plan problem (MP-MBPP), based on the operation of twin 40-foot QCs. The aim of this model is to minimize container rehandling and the time required for twin 40-foot QCs operation movement. A variety of new stowing strategies have been designed, and the improved coded particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is used to optimize the position of double-bays, reducing the number and distance of QC movements and minimizing ship berthing time. By comparing the impact of different stowage rules on ship berthing time through examples, verification shows that the proposed stowage model and solving algorithm can obtain optimized solutions. Under the same initial conditions, the double-bay stowage based on the twin 40-foot QCs can improve operation efficiency by at least 20.3%, compared to the single-bay with ordinary QC, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.