This paper proposed a liner programming model to deal with the Quay Crane (QC) allocation and scheduling problem for single ship under the circumstance of fixed berth allocation. With the aim of minimizing the working time of the ship at berth, the model considered not only the disruptive waiting time when the quay cranes were working, but also the workload balance between the cranes. And an Improved Ant Colony Optimization (IACO) algorithm with the embedding of a solution space split strategy was presented to solve the model. The experimental results show that the proper allocation and scheduling of quay cranes from the model in this paper can averagely save 31.86% of the crane resource compared with full application of all available cranes. When comparing to the solution solved by Lingo, the results from IACO algorithm have an average deviation of 5.23%, while the average CPU (Central Processing Unit) computational time is reduced by 78.7%, which shows the feasibility and validity of the proposed model and the algorithm.