The Berth Allocation Problem with Service Time and Delay Time Objectives

This study addresses a two-objective berth allocation problem: ship service quality expressed by the minimisation of delay in ships' departure and berth utilisation expressed by the minimisation of the total service time. In this problem, noninferior solutions are expected to be identified. Two heuristics, which are implemented based on two existing procedures of the subgradient optimisation and genetic algorithm, are proposed for solving this problem. Through numerical experiments, it was found that in most cases the genetic algorithm outperformed the subgradient optimisation. Also the tight time window yielded noninferior solutions. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2007) 9, 269–290. doi:10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100186