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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