Short-term berth planning and ship scheduling for a busy seaport with channel restrictions

Baoli Liu, Zhi-Chun Li, Yadong Wang and Dian Sheng

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2021, vol. 154, issue C

Abstract: This paper addresses the short-term berth planning and ship scheduling issues for a busy seaport with channel restrictions, in which the channel width of the port can accommodate one large-sized ship only or two small-sized ships in its two-way navigation (inbound and outbound). A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is presented, in which the inbound/outbound movements of ships between multiple anchorages and multiple basins, and the shifting movements of ships between or within the harbor basins are explicitly taken into account. In view that the MILP model is usually computationally low-efficient for practical large-sized problems, we reformulate the MILP into an equivalent set-partitioning model and develop a column generation (CG) algorithm to solve this model. Several efficient methods are also proposed to improve the performance of the CG algorithm. The computational experiments for a real Chinese port show that the proposed CG algorithm significantly outperforms some existing methods (e.g., branch-and-cut and truncated column generation) and the port scheduling schemes adopted in reality. It can solve the instances with up to 35 inbound ships, 35 outbound ships, 6 shifting ships, and 43 berths within ten minutes, with an average optimality gap of 0.32%. Managerial insights for the port operators are also provided to guide the operations and management of the ports with channel restrictions.

Keywords: Port operations; Berth planning; Ship scheduling; Channel restrictions; Column generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554521002301
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:154:y:2021:i:c:s1366554521002301

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102467

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().