An Integrated Quay Crane Assignment and Scheduling Problem Using Branch-and-Price

This paper investigates the integrated quay crane assignment and scheduling problem (QCASP). The problem requires determining the assignment of quay cranes to vessels and the scheduling of operations to be performed by each quay crane. Different practical aspects of the problem are considered including non-crossing and safety margin constraints. The resulting problem is NP-complete and, therefore, requires advanced techniques to solve it. For this purpose, we propose an exact method based on a branch-and-price algorithm. Computational experiments show that the proposed method can solve large-sized problems efficiently.