Efficient Heuristics for the Dynamic Berth Allocation Problem in Discrete Berthing Locations

Abstract

Marine container terminal is a switching facility of containers between sea and Iand as well as between deepsea and shortsea for sea transiportation legs. The overall terminal eenciency highly depends on harmenized operations of complicated and difierent handling tasks being undertaken at the terminal. One of the most important operational issues is the berth allocation schecluling (or berth aliocation problem), becagse an improper berth schedule forces ships to be berthed far from their containers to be handled in a yard. Such an unproductive servjce situation is never able to be overcome by any proper operational efforts fbr other handling tasks, The authors developed heuristics that were implemented using a subgradient optimization technique with a Lagrangian relaxation to the original problem for the dynamic berth allocation problem in discrete lecations. This study improves the heuristics by introducing a new procedure to find a better feasible solution in the entire iterative process of subgradient technique.