Optimal Allocation of Ships to Quay Length in Container Ports

Due to the continuously increasing container trade, many terminals are presently operating at or close to capacity. An efficient terminal is one that facilitates the quick transshipment of containers to and from ships. In this sake, this paper addresses the ship assignments problem at a maritime container terminal, where ships are normally assigned to specific quay cranes until the work is finished. The paper’s target is to develop a new Continues Berth Allocation Problem (CBAP) in the form of a mixed integer nonlinear programming to achieve the best service time in a container terminal. For illustrating the accuracy of Proposed model (PM), Imai et. al. ʹs model (IM) (TRANSPORT RES B, 39 (2005) 199–221) was applied and a wide variety of computational test examples were conducted. The results of demonstrated that the presented BAPC reduces the number of nonlinear variables (constraints) and generates substantial savings in the CPU time.