Integrating Berthing Plan and Container Transshipment at the Sea‐Rail Intermodal Terminal

ABSTRACT The adoption of positioning, tracking and communication technologies in modern ports enables real‐time monitoring of vessel arrivals, container movements and equipment status, while automated technologies help ensure operations adhere more closely to schedules. These capabilities allow ports to implement more intelligent and dynamic planning and scheduling strategies. Building on this technological foundation, this paper investigates a comprehensive operation optimization approach that integrates the berth allocation (BAP) and container transshipment problem at a port terminal within a sea‐rail intermodal transportation system. The study focuses on berth and quay crane allocation on the quayside, as well as container storage and train operation scheduling on the landside, with components interconnected through the flow of import intermodal containers. A mathematical programming model is developed and a variable neighbourhood search algorithm is proposed, with its performance compared against GUROBI and other heuristic algorithms. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic approach. Furthermore, the impacts of quayside equipment deployment and rail yard operational capacity are analysed to provide managerial insights for improving container terminal operations.