Optimizing Maritime Vessel Service Time with Adaptive Quay Crane Deployment Through Level 4 Hard-Soft Information Fusion

Commercial maritime ports must maintain high service throughput in order to remain profitable. One of the most critical operations in a commercial maritime port is the loading and unloading of shipping containers on a vessel (i.e. servicing a vessel) and storing them in the storage yard. A delay in this process would cause cascading delays in servicing further vessels, causing delays in moving cargo across land, rail, and sea. Furthermore, the port itself may incur fines for allowing such delays in their operational procedure. This work highlights a Fuzzy System optimized by a Genetic Algorithm to adaptively control the deployment of quay cranes (and their operators and all other supporting equipment and personnel) to optimize the time required to service a vessel, while simultaneously reducing the operational costs of doing so.