摘要: |
Maritime transport is the major means for international trading, which depends heavily on port infrastructure, including berth. How to best utilize the berths of a port is an essential issue. This research focuses on dealing with one specific type of berth allocation problem (BAP) — the dynamic and continuous berth allocation problem (DCBAP) —in which both arrived and incoming ships are considered and a quay is entirely used as a continuous line to accommodate the calling ships. A two-stage heuristic has been proposed to solve the DCBAP. At the first stage, with the randomly generated ship data, the heuristic creates a ship placement sequence based on the estimated times of arrival (ETAs) the calling ships. At the second stage, it places ships into a time-space diagram one by one according to their desired berthing locations and ETAs. While placing a ship and this causes an overlap of ships the heuristic moves the ship to resolve the overlap based one the estimated costs of three different moving direction (i.e. up, down or right). Then, the least-cost moving direction is the first priority used to resolve the overlap. The aim is to minimize the total cost consisting of sub-costs that includes waiting and handling. Java language was used to implement this heuristic. Our experimental results showed that the heuristic was able to find the optimal/near-optimal solution with reasonable time. |