Track: Operations Research

Abstract

The bottle neck of Maritime transportation is the time spent by vessels at a Container Terminal (CT). Time is money for the logistic business and hence the time spent by a vessel at the CT results in major part of losses for the customer: transport companies. As a result, they strive for shorter stay time at CT. In order to survive in the competition by satisfying their customers every CT works on minimizing the Turnaround Time of Vessel (TTV). The TTV varies across all berths. Therefore, allocation of vessel to berth in order to minimize the TTV is the prime objective of the CT. Thus, this study focuses on dynamic Berth Allocation Problem (BAP), considering discrete berth layout. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed with the objective of minimizing the total finish time of all vessels. Further, a simple heuristic method (HM), based on early-to-finish strategy, for generating a feasible solution is developed. Finally, the quality of the solution obtained from the proposed HM is compared with the exact solution obtained from the proposed MILP model on 10 problem instances and observed empirically that the proposed HM provides efficient/optimal solutions in almost all the 7 instances.

Keywords

Container Terminal, Turnaround Time of Vessel, Berth Allocation Problem, Mixed Integer Linear Programming Model, Heuristic Method