Optimization problems in the operational management of a container terminal

The sea world trade and, in particular, that of containerized cargo, has steeply increased in the last decades. Therefore, transshipment container terminals (hubs) are become the most relevant nodes in the worldwide transportation network. A transshipment port is a very complex system, where daily a large number of processes need to be optimized, and the related terminal resources coordinated, in order to guarantee valuable rates of e ciency. Therefore the terminal managers have to face the increasing freight volumes, the handling of always larger containerships, while e ciently managing the available resources (equipment and manpower) and the related logistic processes. Although the decision making process is usually hierarchical, which leads to tackle each managerial problem on separate and independent stages, problems still remain very di cult to solve. Actually most of them are modeled as Integer Linear Programs, characterized by a huge number of decision variables and constraints. For this reason they represent a challenging task for standard optimization methods: commercial solvers embedding classical algorithms often fail also in computing feasible solutions in a reasonable amount of time. We brie y survey the most signi cant optimization problems arising in the management of a transshipment container terminal at the operational level. In particular we refer to the Gioia Tauro Container Terminal, one of the most important hub ports in the Mediterranean Sea. Some of these problems have been extensively studied in the scienti c literature: we outline our point of view and the contribution of our past research to their solution [3]. Then we focus on some new problems which are the object of our current research.