Maritime and Inland Port Resource Scheduling

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, maritime and inland waterways transportation has been developing rapidly. In view of the great complexity of the resource coupling relationship in the port and the spatio-temporal distribution characteristics of shipping demand, it is imperative to design effective container shipping service networks, to improve the shipping efficiency and the overall service level of the ports.

With the continuous growth of port trade, ports are becoming busier than ever, and the competition among ports has become increasingly fierce. For most ports, resources such as berth space, yard space and handling equipment are very limited. Therefore, the requirements of port scheduling, operational planning and management in ports also keep rising. Specifically, as a part of port scheduling, berth allocation and quay crane allocation problem relate to many critical factors, such as lane conditions, service levels of port handling equipment, ship types, waterlines, and the size of berths.

The increasing volume of container trade and the upsizing of the ships have led to increased competition among container ports, and each port tries to accommodate more ships. As a result, most ports prefer to plan their operations independently, and a delay in one port can potentially be propagated through the shipping service to other ports or incur higher fuel costs for the carriers (shipping lines) if ships’ speeds need to be increased to make up for the delay

The countermeasures of the current research can be categorized into three aspects: 1) Reduce the total handling time and improve facility utilization. 2) Establish a strong collaboration between carriers and port operators by using the cooperative game theory. 3) Design efficient algorithms to consider the sailing speed optimization problem while designing the ship routing.

Regarding the above challenges, this Special Issue aims to solicit high-quality and state-of-the-art research in theoretical and practical innovation in the optimization of waterways transportation. The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Berth allocation, quay crane assignment, yard crane scheduling, co-scheduling of port resources
• Cooperative optimization for port and shipping line
• Sailing speed optimization, ship routing

Prof. Dr. Bin Ji
Dr. Shuanglin Li
Prof. Dr. Dezhi Zhang
Guest Editors

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