We consider the problem of allocating vessels to a berth in a container terminal with the objective of minimizing total weighted berthing duration time of all vessels. Two mathematical formulations are developed to provide a guideline for a branch and bound method and offer a relatively efficient lower bound generated by a Lagrangian relaxation method respectively. The branch and bound method is developed to solve small-sized(15 vessels or so) problems. For large-sized problems, we develop a heuristic method based on multiprocessor task scheduling model with the consideration of consecutive processors requirement. Then we perform worst case analysis for two different types of weights. We also suggest a neighboring search algorithm to improve solution quality. The computational experimen...[ Read more ]

We consider the problem of allocating vessels to a berth in a container terminal with the objective of minimizing total weighted berthing duration time of all vessels. Two mathematical formulations are developed to provide a guideline for a branch and bound method and offer a relatively efficient lower bound generated by a Lagrangian relaxation method respectively. The branch and bound method is developed to solve small-sized(15 vessels or so) problems. For large-sized problems, we develop a heuristic method based on multiprocessor task scheduling model with the consideration of consecutive processors requirement. Then we perform worst case analysis for two different types of weights. We also suggest a neighboring search algorithm to improve solution quality. The computational experiments show the efficiency of our solution approaches.