AN INTEGRATED SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION APPROACH FOR SEASIDE TERMINAL OPERATIONS Daniela Ambrosino Elena Tànfani Department of Economics and Quantitative Methods (DIEM) University of Genova Via Vivaldi 5, 16126, Genova, Italy E-mail: ambrosin@economia.unige.it, etanfani@economia.unige.it , KEYWORDS Discrete Event Simulation, 0/1 MIP optimization model, container terminal, seaside operations planning, performance analysis. ABSTRACT In this paper we focus our attention on the operational decision problems related to the seaside area of maritime container terminals. In particular, we face the Quay Crane Assignment Problem (QCAP) and Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP) with an integrated simulation-optimization approach. A 0/1 MIP model is developed in order to determine the optimal assignment, on a shift basis, of QCs to bays of each ship served by the terminal during a given planning horizon, referred as Bay_QCAP. The optimization model solutions are used as input parameters for a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model able to reproduce the system behaviour taking into account its stochastic nature and complexity. The framework can be used for evaluating the impact on the seaside terminal performance of the optimized solutions and the effects of different operative decisions related to the scheduling of QCs. The framework is going to be applied to a real case study pertaining to the Southern European Container Hub (SECH), sited in the Port of Genoa, Italy. INTRODUCTION The competitiveness of a marine container terminal is based on different factors, such as transhipment time combined with low rates for loading and discharging and fast turnover of containers, which corresponds to a reduction of the berthing time and, consequently, of the cost of the whole transportation process. A marine terminal must be managed in such a way to optimise the flow of containers that arrive and leave it in various ways, as, for instance, by trucks, trains and vessels. A terminal can be viewed as made up of many interrelated logistic processes as stressed in Vis and De Koster (2003) and Steenken et al. (2004). In these interesting overview papers the authors give a classification of the decision problems at marine container terminal in accordance with the following logistic processes: i) arrival of the ship, ii) discharging and loading of the ship, iii) transport of containers from ship to stack and vice versa, iv) stacking of containers, and v) inter-terminal transport and other modes of transportation. In this paper we focus our analysis on the discharging and loading of the ship process. In particular, we are interested in the tactical and operational decision problems related to the organization of the loading and unloading operations. Gunther and Kim (2006) propose a classification of the problems arising in terminals following the planning level of decisions. In particular, the strategic level refers to long-term decisions pertaining to layout, connections, equipment, berthing and yard capacity, the tactical level regards mid-term decisions pertaining to berth and yard planning and policies, while the operational level refers to short-term decisions pertaining to quay side and land side operations. It is worth mentioning that there are strong relations among strategic, tactical and operations planning at the seaside area, as at the yard and the landside area. Focusing on the seaside terminal management operations the main problems and their interrelations (see Figure 1) are described in details in a recent survey of Bierwirth and Meisel (2010).                                          !   " !       #  $ %    &     ’( !  !!   !  ( !   ) !    " !"  " Figure 1: Seaside Decision Problems The Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) concerns the assignment of quay space to vessels that have to be unload and loaded at the terminal. The Quay Crane Assignment Problem (QCAP) defines how many QCs assigning to each berthing ship, while the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP) determines the allocation Proceedings 26th European Conference on Modelling and Simulation ©ECMS Klaus G. Troitzsch, Michael Möhring, Ulf Lotzmann (Editors) ISBN: 978-0-9564944-4-3 / ISBN: 978-0-9564944-5-0 (CD)