The main activity of a maritime container terminal consists in loading/unloading containers into/from the berthed vessels, by means of quay cranes. The container moves from the yard storage areas to the quay, and vice versa, are performed by different transportation means, like straddle carriers, AGV's, or trailers. There is a wide agreement on the fact that the reliability and availability of the cargo handling equipment play a very relevant role to guarantee a high quality service. Actually, the most significant indicators of the global terminal performance (throughput, ship turnaround time) are related to the vessel service time, which, on turn, is strongly influenced by the continuous availability and full functionality of the technical re- sources. Nevertheless, the planning and management of the equipment repair and maintenance has not received, so far, enough attention in the scientific literature. In order to introduce the problem, it is worthy to underline that most of the maintenance activities require the downtime of the involved equipment; therefore it is not easy to allocate suitable servicing time windows without affecting the terminal operative continuity. For this reason, the planning of the maintenance activities follows a two-phase process. On the basis of the weekly berthing plan, the service records and the forthcoming deadlines for the preventive maintenance activities of the equipments, the first phase (long-term planning) is aimed at select- ing the equipments to inspect. Then, given the set of equipments to be serviced, the second phase (short-term planning) consists of scheduling all the maintenance activities, while taking into account the availability of the workers responsible for the maintenance. Here we describe an optimization model for the periodic preventive maintenance of the container handling equipments. Inspired by the real context of the Gioia Tauro container terminal, we discuss the problem, and focus on the short-term planning problem. Some preliminary numerical results on real instances are pre- sented.
Optimal management of the equipment maintenance at a container terminal
2015
Abstract
The main activity of a maritime container terminal consists in loading/unloading containers into/from the berthed vessels, by means of quay cranes. The container moves from the yard storage areas to the quay, and vice versa, are performed by different transportation means, like straddle carriers, AGV's, or trailers. There is a wide agreement on the fact that the reliability and availability of the cargo handling equipment play a very relevant role to guarantee a high quality service. Actually, the most significant indicators of the global terminal performance (throughput, ship turnaround time) are related to the vessel service time, which, on turn, is strongly influenced by the continuous availability and full functionality of the technical re- sources. Nevertheless, the planning and management of the equipment repair and maintenance has not received, so far, enough attention in the scientific literature. In order to introduce the problem, it is worthy to underline that most of the maintenance activities require the downtime of the involved equipment; therefore it is not easy to allocate suitable servicing time windows without affecting the terminal operative continuity. For this reason, the planning of the maintenance activities follows a two-phase process. On the basis of the weekly berthing plan, the service records and the forthcoming deadlines for the preventive maintenance activities of the equipments, the first phase (long-term planning) is aimed at select- ing the equipments to inspect. Then, given the set of equipments to be serviced, the second phase (short-term planning) consists of scheduling all the maintenance activities, while taking into account the availability of the workers responsible for the maintenance. Here we describe an optimization model for the periodic preventive maintenance of the container handling equipments. Inspired by the real context of the Gioia Tauro container terminal, we discuss the problem, and focus on the short-term planning problem. Some preliminary numerical results on real instances are pre- sented.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
