Article ID: | iaor20021885 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 35B |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 401 |
End Page Number: | 418 |
Publication Date: | May 2001 |
Journal: | Transportation Research. Part B: Methodological |
Authors: | Nishimura Etsuko, Imai Akio, Papadimitriou Stratos |
Keywords: | containers |
This paper addresses the problem of determining a dynamic berth assignment to ships in the public berth system. While the public berth system may not be suitable for most container ports in major countries, it is desired for higher cost-effectiveness in Japan's ports. The berth allocation to calling ships is a key factor for efficient public berthing. However, it is not calculated in polynomially-bounded time. To obtain a good solution with considerably small computational effort, we developed a heuristic procedure based on the Lagrangian relaxation of the original problem. We conducted a large amount of computational experiments which showed that the proposed algorithm is adaptable to real world applications.