This thesis presents, and brings together, the Ship Loading and the Crane Split problems for shipping container terminals. These problems have been extensively studied in the available literature, but no efforts have been made to solve them in an integrated manner. State-of-the-art research only provides interesting ideas on how to separately solve these problems. Nevertheless, some integration ideas of related problems are interesting for possible work lines. This thesis aims to exploit the flexibility that integrated management of loading operation, planning of terminal resources (quay cranes), and their proper scheduling can provide. The flexibility comes from a cooperative agreement between the terminal operator and the liner shipping company, specifying that the terminal has the right to decide which specific container to load for each slot obeying the class-based stowage plan developed by the liner. Initially, a mathematical model for solving the integrated problem has been formulated. Additionally, another model to obtain strong lower bounds has also been developed. Then a matheuristic solution method to efficiently solve the problem has been proposed. Results prove that the developed algorithm achieves high-quality solutions in a decent amount of time, outperforming the mathematical model due to its inability to solve large benchmark instances because of the extraordinary difficulty associated with them.
