The berth allocation problem in terminals with irregular layouts

Juan Francisco Correcher, Thomas Van den Bossche, Ramon Alvarez-Valdes and Greet Vanden Berghe

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 272, issue 3, 1096-1108

Abstract: As international trade thrives, terminals attempt to obtain higher revenue while coping with an increased complexity with regard to terminal management operations. One of the most prevalent problems such terminals face is the Berth Allocation Problem (BAP), which concerns allocating vessels to a set of berths and time slots while simultaneously minimizing objectives such as total stay time or total assignment cost. Complex layouts of real terminals introduce spatial constraints which limit the mooring and departure of vessels. Although significant research has been conducted regarding the BAP, these real-world restrictions have not been taken into account in a general way. The present work proposes both a mixed integer linear programming formulation and a heuristic, which are capable of obtaining optimal or near-optimal solutions to this novel variant of the BAP. In order to assess the quality of the heuristic, which is being employed in a real tank terminal in Belgium, it is compared against the exact approach by way of randomly-generated instances and real-world benchmark sets derived from the tank terminal.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimization; Port terminal; Berth allocation; Integer programming; Iterated local search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:272:y:2019:i:3:p:1096-1108

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.07.019

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