Analysis of container terminal operations with meta-heuristics and development of an integrated decision support system

Carrying out 90% of world trade by sea, technological developments and innovations with increasing vessel and equipment capacities have caused container terminals in a competing situation. Terminal managers have faced with finding constantly productive methods in order to gain advantage in competition by increasing operation efficiency. The integration of terminal operations and decision problems that exist in those terminal operations has importance in terms of terminal efficiency. In this PhD thesis, it is focused on handling operations performed in quayside of container terminals and meta-heuristic methodologies, aimed to solve quay crane scheduling problem, are proposed. Solutions of problems at different scales are provided with the proposed methodologies and the best methodology is determined by making comparison tests. After that, a decision support system module has been developed which is using the best methodology. The obtained findings show that the developed module has efficient results.