Green port project scheduling with comprehensive efficiency consideration

ABSTRACT

Ports are an important driving force for world economic growth, but they consume considerable energy. The marine sector has proposed the development of green ports to achieve low-carbon sustainable development. This paper presents a green project scheduling model of port construction to optimize comprehensive economic and environmental efficiency. Various realistic constraints are considered, including investment scale, energy savings, emissions reduction, and project priority. Comprehensive efficiency involves cost reduction, energy savings, emissions reduction, and other efficiency goals. The problem is formulated as an integer program and is solved using CPLEX in a general algebraic modeling system (GAMS). We use a representative port in China as a case port in solving its green project scheduling. The results show that the port can save 6,527 tons of standard coal, reduce 40,875 tons of CO₂, and save 49 million yuan per year in the five-year implementation period. The payback in investing in these green projects is less than six years. From an economic and environmental perspective, the comprehensive efficiency achieved is significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Green port
• comprehensive efficiency
• project scheduling
• energy savings
• emissions reduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jiangsu Social Science Fund [18GLB013]; the Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education Planning Fund [18YJAZH092 and 18YJC630054]; Key Laboratory of Coastal Disaster and Defence of Ministry of Education, Hohai University [201913].