New Valid Inequalities and Combinatorial Benders' Cuts Algorithm for the Quayside Operation Optimization Problem Without Big-M Coefficient

This paper studies the quayside operation problem, in which three seaside planning decisions are integrated, with the objective of minimizing the maximum relative tardiness. A refinement of the state-of-the-art formulation is presented in this work, and an improved exact combinatorial Benders decomposition algorithm is devised for the problem at container terminals which used to be typically modeled by mixed-integer linear programming problems containing a large number of “big-M” coefficients.