Joint berth allocation and quay crane assignment under different carbon taxation policies

The environmental pollution issue of port has been highly concerned about by government and green port has been a focus to sustain the development of maritime transportation. At present, the port operator mainly takes measures of designing reasonable berth allocation for vessels and improving loading/unloading efficiency of quay cranes to reduce the carbon emission of port. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has proposed to impose carbon emission tax on ports in the long-term, which would definitely enhance the willingness of ports to reduce the carbon emission. Therefore, this paper makes effort to explore the study of integrated berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem with considering two policies of different carbon emission taxation rates on port: one is unitary taxation rate and the other is piecewise taxation rate. Two corresponding mathematical optimization models are proposed for the two policies respectively and a number of equivalent or relaxed models are developed to ease the models. Finally, a set of test instances are randomly generated to access the applicability of the proposed models and an actual case is implemented to evaluate the effect of imposing carbon emission taxation on carbon emission reduction. It is found that the carbon emission taxation policy has significant effect on berth-QC plans and the carbon emission can be significantly reduced.