Journal Article

Models and Tabu Search Heuristics for the Berth-Allocation Problem

Legato, Pasquale, Moccia, Luigi, Cordeau, Jean-Francois, Laporte, Gilbert

2005

Overview

In the berth-allocation problem (BAP) the aim is to optimally schedule and assign ships to berthing areas along a quay. The objective is the minimization of the total (weighted) service time for all ships, defined as the time elapsed between the arrival in the harbor and the completion of handling. Two versions of the BAP are considered: the discrete case and the continuous case. The discrete case works with a finite set of berthing points. In the continuous case ships can berth anywhere along the quay. Two formulations and a tabu search heuristic are presented for the discrete case. Only small instances can be solved optimally. For these sizes the heuristic always yields an optimal solution. For larger sizes it is always better than a truncated branch-and-bound applied to an exact formulation. A heuristic is also developed for the continuous case. Computational comparisons are performed with the first heuristic and with a simple constructive procedure.

• Publisher: INFORMS,Transportation Science Section of the Operations Research Society of America,Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
• Subject: Allocation / Analysis / Applied sciences / berth allocation / Container terminals / Exact sciences and technology / Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction / Heuristic / Heuristics / Logistics / Marine and water way transportation and traffic / maritime container terminal / Mathematical models / Minimization / Objective functions / Operations research / Ports / Quays / Routing / Scheduling / Scheduling (Management) / Shipping industry / Ships / Statistical analysis / Studies / Tabu search / Time windows / Transportation / Transportation planning, management and economics / Transportation terminals / Transshipment / vehicle routing