AN INTEGRATED SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION APPROACH FOR SEASIDE TERMINAL OPERATIONS

In this paper we focus our attention on the operational decision problems related to the seaside area of maritime container terminals. In particular, we face the Quay Crane Assignment Problem (QCAP) and Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP) with an integrated simulation-optimization approach. A 0/1 MIP model is developed in order to determine the optimal assignment, on a shift basis, of QCs to bays of each ship served by the terminal during a given planning horizon, referred as Bay_QCAP. The optimization model solutions are used as input parameters for a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model able to reproduce the system behaviour taking into account its stochastic nature and complexity. The framework can be used for evaluating the impact on the seaside terminal performance of the optimized solutions and the effects of different operative decisions related to the scheduling of QCs. The framework is going to be applied to a real case study pertaining to the Southern European Container Hub (SECH), sited in the Port of Genoa, Italy.