Exact and heuristic methods for placing ships in locks

J. Verstichel, P. De Causmaecker, F.C.R. Spieksma and G. Vanden Berghe

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 235, issue 2, 387-398

Abstract: The ship placement problem constitutes a daily challenge for planners in tide river harbours. In essence, it entails positioning a set of ships into as few lock chambers as possible while satisfying a number of general and specific placement constraints. These constraints make the ship placement problem different from traditional 2D bin packing. A mathematical formulation for the problem is presented. In addition, a decomposition model is developed which allows for computing optimal solutions in a reasonable time. A multi-order best fit heuristic for the ship placement problem is introduced, and its performance is compared with that of the left-right-left-back heuristic. Experiments on simulated and real-life instances show that the multi-order best fit heuristic beats the other heuristics by a landslide, while maintaining comparable calculation times. Finally, the new heuristic’s optimality gap is small, while it clearly outperforms the exact approach with respect to calculation time.

Keywords: Ship placement problem; Packing; Heuristics; Lock scheduling; Decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:235:y:2014:i:2:p:387-398

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2013.06.045

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