Seminar - 11am December 19th 2003, Room 204, The Business School, Imperial
College, London
The Berth Allocation Problem: Application to the Gioia Tauro Maritime
Terminal
by Gilbert Laporte, Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management, HEC
Montreal
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 service
time for all ships, defined
as the time elapsed between their arrival in the harbour 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
site of berthing points. In the continuous case ships can berth anywhere
along the quay. Two
formulations and a tabu search are developed 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 procedure 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.
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