In container terminals, the handling operation of
containers depends on the interaction among handling
equipment such as quay cranes, yard cranes and internal
trucks. Insufficient number of internal trucks causes a
delay in transporting containers and results in low
productivity of quay cranes which is the bottleneck of any
container terminal. This paper presents a new approach
for assigning quay cranes in container terminal taking into
consideration the availability of internal trucks. A two
phase solution methodology is proposed. In the first
phase, a MIP model is formulated to assign quay cranes to
vessels while in the second phase, dynamic programming
is used to determine the specific quay cranes to serve each
vessel. The validity of the proposed approach is
demonstrated by a comparison against a case study from
literature. Moreover, the results show that the shortage in
the required number of internal trucks increases the
average handling time per vessel.