Optimising commercial port operations through high-level information fusion

In order to remain profitable, commercial maritime ports must maintain high throughput of inbound vessels. The gantry cranes that load and unload the vessels are the primary point of interaction between a vessel and the port, which cause a critical bottleneck in the process flow. Errors in this segment of the process cause cascading delays which ultimately cause vessel service backlogs, extending to logistical delays in moving shipping containers across land and rail as well. This is to the detriment of the ports, which lose popularity among shipping lines and may even be fined for causing sub-optimal delays. This work expands on prior work in using a multi-objective genetic algorithm to optimise the parameters of a fuzzy system which controls port-side resource deployment. In contrast to existing solutions, this resource deployer is able to function online and adapt to real-world faults while still maintaining superior performance as compared to industry practice. Further, proposals to expand or reduce the port-side infrastructure are computed.