Abstract: With the growing environmental awareness in the global shipping industry, ports, as key hubs of waterborne transportation, are gradually moving toward green and intelligent development. However, during vessel arrival and departure processes, prolonged waiting at anchorages or berths often leads to increased carbon emissions and reduced operational efficiency in ports. To address these issues, this paper develops a port vessel scheduling optimization method that improves the efficiency of vessel arrival and departure operations while considering carbon emission control in port areas. First, under the premise of ensuring navigational safety and operational continuity, a port vessel arrival and departure scheduling model is established to minimize the total waiting time of vessels in port and total carbon emissions. Second, an Improved Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm Ⅱ (INSGA-Ⅱ) is designed, in which an adaptive crossover and mutation probability mechanism is introduced to accelerate the algorithm convergence. Simulation experiments based on vessel scheduling data from Huanghua Port show that, compared with the First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) scheduling method, the scheduling results obtained by the proposed model reduce the total vessel waiting time and total carbon emissions by 25.2% and 18.5%, respectively. Compared with the traditional Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm Ⅱ, the INSGA-Ⅱ algorithm achieves faster convergence and better stability. The optimized scheduling scheme can effectively balance port operational efficiency and low-carbon emission requirements, providing strong support for ports in formulating intelligent and green vessel scheduling and operation management strategies.