Minimizing port staying time for container terminal with position based handling time

Nowadays, maritime transport operations have become even busier. Due to the limited physical facilities, some vessels will be transferred to other terminals for services. Transferring vessels may reduce the waiting time, however, this induces extra transshipment cost, bad reputation, and potential customer loss. To consider such practical issues, a bi-objective Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) model is proposed. Moreover, vessel priority is another practical concern. In literature, they are divided into two streams, i) customer importance; and ii) handling volume. They give vessel priority by considering only one single factor, but both factors are important. The objective of this paper is to propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to minimize port staying time and transfer rate with the consideration of vessel priority. The results show that the proposed approach is able to obtain solutions with good performance in all the factors.