The berth planning problem

Singapore has one of the busiest ports in the world. Berth planning is one of the problems faced by planners. This paper studies the berth planning problem. We first formulate the problem and show that it is NP-Complete. We transform the berthing problem to a restricted form of the two-dimensional packing problem, use a graph theoretical representation to capture the problem succinctly, and propose an effective heuristic for the problem. Experimental results show that our heuristic performs well on historical test data.