Review of Robust Metaheuristics for Port Scheduling Under Uncertainty

The Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment Problem (BACAP) is a critical scheduling challenge in port terminals, involving the complex coordination of vessel arrivals, berth positions, service durations, and quay crane availability. However, real-world port operations are fraught with uncertainties such as arrival delays, handling time fluctuations, and resource disruptions, which can render schedules optimized under ideal conditions fragile. This paper provides the first focused review of robust population-based metaheuristics specifically designed for BACAP under uncertainty. It systematically categorizes existing methods by their uncertainty representations, robustness criteria, and search mechanisms. The review covers aspects like solution representation, robust evaluation, robustness-guided search dynamics, and feasibility preservation. To facilitate controlled empirical comparisons, the authors present a benchmark suite for uncertain BACAP and report baseline results using representative metaheuristics combined with various robustness strategies. The review concludes by highlighting several open challenges, including the extension of benchmarks, the design of more robustness-aware search algorithms, the development of time-adaptive robustness, and methods for handling non-stationary uncertainty.