Optimal Energy-Transport Scheduling for Bulk Seaport Integrated Energy System

Seaports are the key pivots of maritime transportation system and have great impacts on the overall system efficiency. Varying with the cargo types, seaports can be classified as different types, such as container seaports and bulk seaports. The bulk seaports are used to handle various liquid and solid cargos in large volumes, such as petroleum, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and coal. The liquid cargos are generally bunkering into the transmission pipeline system and the solid cargos are generally transferred by the belt conveyors. In this paper, the energy scheduling models for the bunkering system and the belt conveyor are proposed and then the overall energy-transport scheduling problem for bulk seaport is formulated. The test case verifies the validity of proposed method and the results show that the scheduling of transmission pipeline system and belt conveyor provide adequate flexibilities to the bulk seaport integrated energy system.