Rescheduling Strategy for Berth Planning in Container Terminals: An Empirical Study from Korea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

You are presenting a very interesting issue. Your article is at a high academic and scientific level. It would be interesting to know if and in what modification your methodology is also suitable for inland ports. I recommend only small corrections regarding the quality of the presented figures (all of them have poor quality).

 

Congratulations on your work!

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

First of all, the issue set down in the paper is crucial for container terminals nowadays. The authors undertook an ambitious topic.

Therefore I would recommend to extend the description of technical and economic consequences of ships' delays and co-incidences accelerating negative aspects of delays. It must be also considered a situation when all ships record delays and in such, the terminal has only limited losses.

Secondly, the literature overview could be improved by including more publications of T. Notteboom, D. Acciaro or G. Wilmsmeier or other researchers who deal with the container terminal issues.

Self the methodology proposed by authors is satisfying, although final results could be presented in more visible, clear form, including areas of efficiency improvement, and other advances of the model.

When referring to cost reduction thanks to the proposed model implementation, there is no one conclusion nor recommendation in terms of amount/value potentially to be saved/gained. It could be implemented especially by 3 scenarios analyzed.

Finally, some small editorial mistakes were found - i.e. unnecessary numeration at the beginning of subchapter 3.1. (first line only - 145), or incomplete italics when title mentioning (l. 319 - word "Maritime" - missing italic).

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

This study addresses berth allocation and crane assignment problem at container terminals. The problem is one of main stream problems in the state of the art and new papers certainly enhance the literature. This paper in particular suggests a mathematical model and rolling horizon approach to solve the problem and compares results with real output from port. This paper has good contributions and it is also well written. However, I have some fundamental concerns. I expect authors to conduct a major revision to address following all important comments.

1) I do not think your model (section 3.3) and problem definition address a rescheduling problem. In rescheduling, you should have some baseline berth allocation parameters. Then, your mathematical model tries to minimize the difference between planned baseline plan and real time reactive plan. This is what rescheduling addresses in berth allocation.

Your model is a traditional berth allocation and crane assignment problem. This should be acknowledged/emphasized in the paper. I also think rescheduling should be removed from the title. You can use a rolling horizon method to solve a traditional BACAP.

Therefore, I recommend authors to think over this and either update the title/content etc. or update the models (and algorithm) to address rescheduling problem.

2) Another important concern is on the rolling horizon heuristic in section 4. This reviewer believes that rolling horizon heuristic (RHH) is not well explained. Only general aspects of RHH are explained. A lot more detailed on BACAP RHH should be given. What decisions are fixed? How do you update other variables? How do you solve subproblems? What is termination criteria? How does the flow (psudeo code) ? etc. They should go in paper like following paper: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/845752/

3) The paper is missing a paragraph about the contribution of this work in the introduction section.

4) Discussions about computational performance such as optimality gap, running times are missing. They could be included.

5) A better comparison to state of art similar method (https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/845752/) can be conducted.

Minor comments  

1) I encourage authors to give additional reference to following papers which are very relevant:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554515001301

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/trsc.1120.0428

2) In several studies, a_i is called as m_i. I also encourage authors to call it that way to improve uniformity between studies.

3) Page 4, n_i definition can be updated as ; "Possible number of QCs...", adding possible would show it is not a decision variable.

4) In figures 5-10, you use the term "Model", but it actually rolling horizon heuristic (RHH). It would be good to call it RHH in figures.

5) In future work, you can consider energy costs of scheduling QCs (setup). You can note that following works consider energy efficiency and optimisation in berth operations. 

• Optimal energy management and operations planning in seaports with smart grid while harnessing renewable energy under uncertainty. Omega, 102445, 2021.
• A review of energy efficiency in ports: Operational strategies, technologies and energy management systems. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 112, pp.170-182, 2019.

Thanks

Best regards

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The revision addresses my comments quite well. Especially through Figure 3, problem definition is well explained. I recommend publishing this paper.