Time-of-Use Scheduling Optimization of Berth–Quay Crane–Shore Power Systems for Inland Ports Along the Yangtze River

The large-scale deployment of shore power in inland river ports offers new opportunities for optimizing port scheduling under time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing and supports green sustainable port development. However, existing scheduling methods are mostly designed for seaports and ignore the unique constraints of inland ports, such as mandatory shore power compliance, navigation channel time windows, and transformer capacity limits. Focusing on inland container ports in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, this paper investigates the integrated scheduling of berths, quay cranes, and shore power under TOU pricing. A bi-objective integer programming model is formulated to minimize both operational efficiency cost and TOU electricity procurement cost, and an improved NSGA-II framework with a weighted sum scanning strategy and greedy repair operator is developed to generate the Pareto front. A standard case with 20 ships, 6 berths, and 24 quay cranes validates the proposed method. Results show that compared with the arrival-order reference, the selected compromise schedule reduces operational cost by 71.15% and electricity cost by 16.39% and raises the valley-period energy share from 33.92% to 45.18%. All ships achieve zero tardiness with an average waiting time of 0.54 h. The improved algorithm yields a mean hypervolume of 0.810 ± 0.025 and an IGD+ of 0.042 ± 0.006 over 30 independent runs, with a total runtime of 52.6 ± 3.1 s for the 20-ship case. Under stated efficiency and emission assumptions, net daily CO₂ reduction reaches 1.21 tons per day. Dedicated 400 kW shore transformers remain non-binding for the modeled ship loads. The proposed method can support inland port scheduling decision-making and promote sustainable low-carbon port development.