A Joint Operational Scheme of Berths and Yards at Container Terminals with Computational Logistics and Computational Intelligence

Recently, the rapid development of container transportation has brought unprecedented pressure and challenges to container terminals. Terminal operators must consider to optimize the integrated scheduling of the production resources to improve the running efficiency of the container terminal handling systems. Consequently, we mainly consider the berth and yard collaborative allocation for import and export synchronous operation (BYCA-IESO) in a flexible and tunable planning cycle whose optimization objective covers the consume time of calling liners and the horizontal transferring distances of the yard trailer. The refined BYCA-IESO model with synchronization or asynchronous decision time ticks and a cascade multi-stage integrated heuristic algorithm based on tabu search and ant colony optimization are combined to achieve the goal, which has been proved feasible, reasonable, credible and effective by the intensive numerical experiments. It demonstrates the availability and superiority of the combination of computational logistics and computational intelligence to solve the scheduling and decision issues of complex logistics system from the perspective of the unification and synergy of computation.