Today, maritime transportation has been grown due to decentralized production and increased communication between different countries. Container transportation has contributed a significant share of global transportation due to the possibility of moving a large volume of goods at a reasonable cost. With the expansion of container transportation, container terminals as a place to transport containers between land and sea play a pivotal role in the global transportation network. Container terminals are divided into seaside and landside. To better manage the terminals and reduce costs, the main problems at the seaside and the landside need to be addressed in an integrated manner. Literature review shows that despite the importance of the matter, the berth allocation problem, the storage space assignment problem, and the yard crane deployment problem have not been studied in an integrated manner.
In this research, an integrated mixed integer programming model has been provided to investigate the storage space assignment problem, the berth allocation problem, and the yard crane deployment with the traffic congestion at the passing lines consideration on the daily planning horizon. The objective function of this mathematical model includes minimizing the yard crane movement cost, the yard crane operating cost, the cost related to the route length of the container transportation between the berth and the yard, and the penalty cost caused by delaying the vessels. In the proposed model, the discrete berth layout has been considered. The movement capacity is determined to prevent traffic congestion in the passing lines. Also, 8 valid inequalities based on the concepts and assumptions of the problems are considered to improve the proposed integrated model. To validate the proposed model, 32 instances are generated based on the data production framework in the literature, and their results are presented. The results indicate the proper performance of the proposed integrated model.