Simulated annealing with different vessel assignment strategies for the continuous berth allocation problem

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Abstract

The berth allocation problem is an optimization problem concerning seaside operations at container terminals. This study investigates the dynamic and continuous berth allocation problem (BAP), whose objective is to minimize the total weighted service time and the deviation cost from vessels’ preferred position. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming model. Due to that the BAP is NP-hard, two efficient and effective simulated annealing (SA) algorithms are proposed to locate vessels along the quay. The first SA assigns vessels to available positions along the quay from the left to the right, while the second assigns vessels from both sides. Both small and large-scale instances in the literature are tested to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed SA algorithms using the optimization software Gurobi and heuristic algorithms from the literature. The results indicate that the proposed SAs can provide optimal solutions in small-scale instances and updates the best solutions in large-scale instances. The improvement over other comparing heuristics is statistically significant.

Keywords

Berth allocation problem Continuous Simulated annealing Container terminal 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital for financially supporting this research Grants MOST 105-2410-H-182-009-MY2 and CMRPD3G0011, respectively.

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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Information ManagementChang Gung UniversityTaoyuanTaiwan, ROC
  2. 2.Department of Industrial Engineering and ManagementMing Chi University of TechnologyTaipeiTaiwan, ROC
  3. 3.Department of NeurologyLinkou Chang Gung Memorial HospitalTaoyuanTaiwan, ROC
  4. 4.Department of Industrial Engineering and ManagementYuan Ze UniversityTaoyuanTaiwan, ROC

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